Hello, friends and strangers! My name is Anna. I'm a mom, an artist, and a wife, and I have stage 4 breast cancer.

I was first treated for stage 2b breast cancer in 2021-2022. Because my cancer was locally advanced but hadn't spread further than my axillary lymph nodes, my medical team opted to pull out all the stops; I had two different types of chemo, a bilateral mastectomy with lymph node dissection, radiation, immunotherapy, targeted therapy, and endocrine therapy. It was the roughest ride I've ever taken in my life. But in late 2022, I got to ring the bell and was pronounced "NED" (No Evidence of Disease). But because it had spread to my lymph nodes, I always knew I was high-risk for recurrence.

In September 2025, I began having pains in my hip; I chalked it up to sciatica, as the pain was intermittent. But around Christmas 2025, I began having pain in my upper abdomen and feeling just generally unwell. I spoke to my oncologist about it at my regular oncology check-up in January. My oncologist thought we should order a CT to be safe, and it showed that my cancer was indeed back, and that it had spread to my bones, my lungs, and my liver. Those hip pains were caused by the metastases in my pelvic bones, and the belly pain and unwell feeling were caused by the metastases in my lungs and liver.

Now that the scans and biopsies are all complete, we've decided to treat the cancer fairly aggressively, with 6-8 chemo infusions to begin with. When that's complete, I'll have immunotherapy and targeted therapy, depending on how the cancer responds to the chemo.

It's hard to articulate how devastating this diagnosis is. At the time of this writing, I'm still processing it. It doesn't feel real. But the medical bills that have started to pile up (even though I do have medical insurance) are very, very real. And because I now have Stage 4 cancer, I will receive treatment in some form or another for the rest of my life. As a self-employed artist, I'm not only worried about my medical bills, but the loss of income that I will likely experience as a result of being unable to work as much as I'm accustomed to working.

Your support will help with:

If you are able to donate, thank you from the bottom of my heart. If you'd like to help but are unable to donate, please consider sharing this fundraiser on your social media to help raise visibility. Thank you so much.

With love,

Anna