Still in treatment and living well
by Richard Saltus
Maintaining a 31-foot sailboat is hard work, but Miriam Shafner says it's all worth it when summer sailing season arrives.
While Miriam Shafner was happy to be interviewed for a Dana-Farber publication, finding the time in her chock-full schedule proved no easy matter.
It was spring, and Shafner and her husband, Richard, who live in Lynnville, Mass., were readying their 31-foot boat for the sailing season, when they spend most weekends afloat. The Shafners are active in the United States Power Squadrons, a national boat safety organization, and the Civil Air Patrol (both earned pilot's licenses), which carries out search and rescue missions. Not long ago, they trained a guide dog puppy for the blind, and plan to take on another. In addition, Shafner sews, sings in the church choir, and takes care of her 1-year-old grandson once or twice a week.
"I'm probably doing too much," she says. "I get tired." Yet for someone who's 63, her get-up-and-go is all the more remarkable because Shafner has been living for the last seven years with breast cancer that has metastasized to her bones.
Miriam Shafner takes the wheel while her husband, Richard, takes it easy.
Fewer than 1 in 10 women have metastases when they're first diagnosed with breast cancer. However, about 30 percent of patients with early breast cancer will eventually have a recurrence, either local recurrence or metastases. A metastasis means that new tumors have formed by cancer cells that have spread to other parts of the body.
Cancer that has reached this stage can't be cured. With some women the cancer steadily grows worse, and in a very small minority it progresses in a matter of months. Overall, however, newer drugs and treatments are making a difference. A study from British Columbia published in Cancer in the summer of 2007 found that survival among women diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in the late 1990s increased by about 30 percent compared to women diagnosed earlier in the '90s.
For someone with metastatic disease, Shafner has been unusually fortunate. She has lived with recurrent cancer for seven years so far, and they have been good years. "Actually at this point, the cancer is in the back of my mind as opposed to being in the front," she says. "I don't have to think about it every minute."
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