Lori Marx-Rubiner

While the fact that the cancer spread to her brain was terrifying, at the time, we were more concerned about the spread to Lori’s lungs as she was having difficulty breathing. While it’s hard to speak for her, I think Lori would want you to continue to support positive breast cancer advocacy groups such as the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation and Breast Cancer Action. She would ask you to support the California Breast Cancer Research Foundation and Cancer Base. She would tell you to “pink responsibly” every October and remember that 30% of breast cancer will become metastatic and that is the cancer that kills.

As I write this I’m going on hour 26 of the 48-hour Hack for Health, a University of Southern California-based, CancerBase-sponsored hackathon. With me are about 70 students from the schools of engineering, computer science, health sciences and more, along with at least a dozen mentors who span patient advocacy, cancer research, oncology, and tech development. Since we’re still in the middle of it, I can’t tell you what the various teams are working on, but I can tell you that they are passionate, creative and innovative. They are so engaged that even these starving students are pretty much ignoring dinner in favor of working.

The stress, anxiety, fear and weight of living with metastatic breast cancer is a constant in my life. So a few months ago, when I started having persistent abdominal pain, and my tumor marker showed the likelihood of more cancer, I put it all together and wrote off the increasing pain to the increasing cancer. The CT contrast usually leaves me pretty sick, so I wasn’t shocked when I felt horrible on Friday evening and Saturday morning. One of life’s reminders that MBC doesn’t protect us from life’s other garbage…