Laurie's Story

Laurie is the contributing editor for Breast Cancer. She writes at Not Just About Cancer and she is also a contributor at Mothers With Cancer. Her book, I'm Not Done Yet, is due out in Spring 2009.

Laurie is 41 years old, a mother to two boys (who are now five and ten years old), a spouse, friend, sister, daughter and writer. She is also living with metastatic breast cancer.

In December, 2005, as she was getting undressed one evening she found the lump that would lead to a diagnosis of breast cancer. After seven months on a grueling treatment regimen (mastectomy, chemotherapy and radiation), Laurie joyfully returned to work, only to be diagnosed three weeks later with a metastasis (spread of the cancer) to her liver.

As her oncologist recently put it, “sixteen years ago, women with liver mets only had a matter of months to live,” yet here she is, miraculously in remission and continuing to defy the odds. Laurie has now had three clean (no sign at all of cancer in the liver or anywhere else) CT scans (her first was in June 2006 and the most recent was last May) and the same oncologist has declared himself to be “amazingly optimistic,” going so far as to call Laurie’s results “spectacular.”

Laurie knows that she is not, as the doctors say, “out of the woods for good” and she continues to go for monthly treatments of chemotherapy and herceptin. But aside from a few days a month, she lives an active, happy life with her family and their two sweet dogs and crotchety old cat.