This type of cancer, also called stage 4 breast cancer, means the cancer has metastasized, or traveled, through the bloodstream to create tumors in the liver, lungs, brain, bones and/or other parts of the body.
Schoger’s breast cancer — called invasive lobular carcinoma or ILC — came back 15 years after her original diagnosis and treatment.
“You think you’re going to be flying to Chicago and land at O’Hare and you end up on Mars,” she said of her April 2013 mets diagnosis. “It’s not well known that you can have late recurrence. I even had an oncology nurse tell me ‘Oh, you’re cured’ at eight years.”
Schoger’s doctors threw everything at her cancer after her initial diagnosis: mastectomy, chemotherapy, radiation and the daily medication tamoxifen, a form of hormone (or endocrine) therapy designed to cut off the food supply of her estrogen-receptor-positive (ER+) breast cancer.
But with MBC, the treatment philosophy is different.
“With primary cancer, they say, ‘We’re going to pull out all the big guns. We’re going to put it in permanent remission,’” she said. “With MBC, you use as little as possible to get the biggest effect. You attempt to stabilize the disease.”
For Schoger, that means a daily aromatase inhibitor (AI), which shuts down estrogen production even further to starve her cancer, along with a monthly infusion of Xgeva, a bone strengthening agent designed to combat the bone-zapping side effects of her AI treatment.
Schoger said she will remain on this therapy until it stops working. Then, like most patients with MBC, she’ll move on to something else.
“With metastasis, you’ll have times where you’re responding well and your disease is stable,” she said. “And then there will be a scary time of progression. Then there will be a new treatment, a time of stability again, then — boom — progression. And it’s all sort of going down each time that happens.
“None of us knows which way our disease is going to go,” said Schoger, who has lost many friends to MBC. “Everybody hopes for the longest possible time for the first therapy you’re given. But some women have aggressive disease and just blow through their therapies.”
From ‘cured’ to stage 4
Others, like Teri Pollastro, a 54-year-old stage 4 patient from Seattle, respond surprisingly well.
Diagnosed with early stage ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) in 1999, Pollastro underwent a mastectomy but did not receive chemotherapy, radiation or tamoxifen, since her cancer was ER negative.
“They used the C-word with me, they told me I was cured,” she said. “Every time I went back to my oncologist, he would roll his eyes at me when I had questions.”
In 2003, Pollastro switched to Seattle Cancer Care Alliance where she saw Dr. Julie Gralow, a breast cancer oncologist and clinical researcher at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Gralow discovered Pollastro’s cancer had metastasized to her liver.
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“My husband and I were in shock,” said Pollastro of her mets diagnosis. “You don’t go from being cured to stage 4.”
Pollastro went on Herceptin, a type of immunotherapy for women with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer, and did six months of chemotherapy.
“I felt better right away with the treatment,” she said. “But the problem is, it stopped [working]. That’s what you can expect with mets. And there’s always some residual cancer. And that starts percolating.”
And along with mets, she also had to deal with many misconceptions regarding her disease.
“People don’t understand the word metastatic to begin with,” she said. “They’d say, ‘Oh now you have liver cancer? How could that happen? Doesn’t it go to the other breast first? And when I’d tell them I was stage 4, they’d give me pity or stay away or see me a year later and think I was a ghost. They couldn’t believe I was alive.”
The Mercer Island, Washington, mother of two, who often counsels newly diagnosed patients, sometimes even found it difficult to relate to early stage breast cancer survivors.
“They’re like, ‘I did this’ and ‘I did that’ and ‘I beat cancer’ and they think they’re going to be fine and I think, ‘Well, so did I,’” she said. “Or people will ask me, ‘Aren’t you worried about all that radiation you’re getting from your scans?’ and I’ll think, ‘Are you kidding me? You think I’ve got a choice here?’”
New targeted therapies
As new treatments are slowly being approved, MBC patients are starting to have more choices, though.
Gralow said the Human Genome Project has led to a much better understanding of breast cancer with all of its subsets and behavior patterns. Therapies are no longer “one-size-fits-all” but targeted for each cancer subset.
“We still have a long way to go and we are still losing too many women … but there is a lot more hope for many years of good quality life for a patient diagnosed with a metastatic recurrence now than there was two decades ago,” she said.
One new drug, Perjeta, has shown particular promise when teamed with Herceptin and chemo, bumping survival rates in HER2-positive mets patients by nearly 16 months.
“That’s meaningful,” said Gralow. “If you look at the old textbooks, we used to predict that you’d live a year or maybe two at most. And if you were HER2 positive, it was much shorter.”
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Pollastro, who was on Herceptin for seven years, has also benefited from new therapies. In 2004, she participated in a vaccine clinical study run by Fred Hutch’s Dr. Nora Disis and also received targeted radiation therapy at a cancer treatment center in Rochester, New York. As a result, she’s currently NED (no evidence of disease).
But she’s still cautious about using the word “cured.”
“The longer I go, the less worried I get,” she said. “But I feel like I’m on a merry-go-round and I keep waiting for it to stop. I’ve lost a lot of friends and feel bad about that. I have a little survivor’s guilt. But It’s like musical chairs. I keep wondering, ‘When am I going to miss the chair?’ So far, I’ve been lucky.”
Schoger, whose disease has stabilized but not disappeared entirely, said she, too, feels lucky.
“I feel like I’m on Easy Street,” she said. “I’m not on chemo right now, I’m on endocrine therapy and it’s shrinking the cancer and relieving symptoms.”
As for the stigma surrounding mets, there are signs that that, too, may be starting to shrink, thanks to the work of advocates.
“This is the first year since I can remember that I’ve seen media reports that have included women with metastatic disease,” said Schoger. “And the MBC Alliance report was very blunt about how the survivorship story has masked the issues of the mets community. If an alliance of breast cancer organizations comes out and makes that strong statement, that’s phenomenal progress. That’s a great step forward.”
*Editor's note: Jody Schoger died of metastatic breast cancer in May 2016. In her own words, she is finally "done with treatment."
Diane Mapes is a staff writer at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. She has written extensively about health issues for NBC News, TODAY, CNN, MSN, Seattle Magazine and other publications. A breast cancer survivor, she blogs at doublewhammied.com and tweets @double_whammied. Email her at dmapes@fredhutch.org.
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