NPR's Jaffe Shares Breast Cancer Diagnosis
- Two years ago, NPR correspondent Ina Jaffe was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, which has spread to her brain and lungs.
- To treat the disease, she has undergone radiation therapy.
- Jaffe previously kept her cancer battle private, but decided to share it publically in the hopes of educating others, and highlighting the need for greater allocation of research funds for researching this kind of breast cancer.
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Jaffe’s Breast Cancer Battle
Jaffe shares that she was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer two years ago. For treatment, she had a titanium rod implanted in her thigh to deal with a bone metastasis. She says “the weirdest thing” has been recovering after brain radiation. “It turns you into a bit of a zombie. But then you get better. Just really slowly,” she writes. Jaffe says she still has some numbness in her fingers, and her balance remains off-kilter.
Jaffe says she’s sharing her diagnosis because her initial “despair” was the result of bad information, and she’s also sharing it due to feelings of outrage over “only 7% of funding for breast cancer research is devoted to metastatic disease.”
Related: Risk Factors for Breast Cancer
The NPR journalist says, “I was wrong about almost everything. So maybe my confession will shorten the Despair Phase for others. I thought metastatic breast cancer was fairly rare. Nope. Up to 30% of women with early stage breast cancer progress to stage 4.”
In her essay, Jaffe highlighted a grim fact of life in the U.S.: The mortality rate for breast cancer is higher for women of color, particularly black women. “Due to the types of cancers that they get,” she writes, “African American women have the highest breast cancer mortality rate of any U.S. racial or ethnic group, at 26.8 per 100,000 annually.”
Management of Metastatic Breast Cancer
Keeping a Cancer Battle Private
Jaffe is not the first public figure who initially chose to keep her cancer battle private. Health is a deeply personal matter, and it’s up to you and you alone to determine who has the right and privilege to know about your diagnoses. Jaffe underscores this point in her essay, writing, “By the way, I have no issue with people who want to keep their cancer diagnosis a secret to the end. If you have the misfortune to have cancer, you get to have it any way you want.”
Jaffe wrote of her decision that keeping her cancer diagnosis a secret “served me well.” Doing so meant that she “didn’t have to explain myself to friends and strangers while I was still in the hysterical stage,” she writes. Detailing the mental and emotional toll of her diagnosis, Jaffe says she stopped sleeping and eating, and she cried a lot. “I was grieving for my own life,” she says.
Dealing With Grief After a Cancer Diagnosis
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