Her husband called her a fighter. Her doctor called her a medical miracle.
Maggie Daley, who died Thursday after more than tripling the average survival rate for those with a metastatic breast cancer diagnosis, said she simply was part of a group ready to face what life threw at them.
“I have a lot of challenges ahead,” Mrs. Daley said in May, at an event celebrating her husband’s tenure as mayor. “But anybody who has cancer has the same experience. We’re a mighty group. I’m not alone. I’m one of many.”
Mrs. Daley was one of many — in January 2008, the National Cancer Institute estimated that about 2.6 million women in the U.S. with a history of breast cancer were alive. In 2011, about 162,000 U.S. women were expected to be living with metastatic breast cancer, where the cancer has spread beyond the breast and lymph nodes, according to the Metastatic Breast Cancer Network.
The average survival rate of metastatic breast cancer is two to three years. Daley lived with the disease for nine years.
“We wish it could be longer, though we have many patients beyond the two- to three-year mark,” said Dr. William Gradishar, director of Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s Maggie Daley Center for Women’s Cancer Care. “Certainly she had a disease that was sensitive to a variety of different therapies. She had perseverance — that was an element that can’t be underestimated. Mixed in there was some component of things we don’t understand. The end result was she had a long survival.”
Beating the odds wasn’t easy. After her June 2002 diagnosis, Mrs. Daley endured repeated hospitalizations, multiple surgeries and rounds of radiation treatment, chemotherapy, hormonal therapy and biological therapy.
Dr. Steven Rosen, a Northwestern oncologist who treated Mrs. Daley for the duration of her illness, said on Thursday despite the difficult treatment, she never gave up.
“She was heroic,” he said. “She was just a very sweet, lovable woman of great substance.” He said her survival was a medical miracle, “a combination of who she was and modern medicine.”
Despite the averages, a metastatic breast cancer diagnosis isn’t an automatic death sentence, said Dr. Rita Nanda, the assistant director of the breast medical oncology program at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
“It’s not the norm, absolutely,” she said of Mrs. Daley, whom she didn’t treat. Targeted therapies, however, can extend a person’s life with metastatic breast cancer, she said.
“I have a patient who was diagnosed with metastatic disease in 1998 and at that time they told her she had six months to live,” Nanda said. “She’s still alive. I just saw her Monday.”
Source:Sun Times