Maria

Posted on by Beth Caldwell

I should be writing about the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium that I attended this week. I learned things, I hugged people, I made new friends, I saw old ones–and we made our voices heard. But that’s not what’s on my heart today. Today, Maria is all I can think about.

Maria Carballo and I met at the Living Beyond Breast Cancer conference last year. She was funny and beautiful and sassy, and I immediately liked her. She was part of a group of us that tried to sneak into the ballroom dancing competition that was happening at the same hotel as the conference (we failed, but we all complimented the dancers on their amazing asses). She sat at the dinner table where we decided to do the die-in at the conference. 

And today she died. She was just 41.

I’ve written before about how much living with metastatic breast cancer is like having AIDS in the early 80’s. But today I’m really feeling it, how the band is marching on, while there is a crisis of women dying and dying and dying. I’ve had three friends die in the last three weeks. I have two more friends in hospice right now. 

And I can’t tell you how many people have told me and my friends this week not to piss off the researchers, not to be too loud, that they’re trying plenty hard enough, that we don’t want to alienate them. That we should be grateful we’re not in the radical mastectomy era anymore, that things are so much better than they used to be, that 6 months of extra life is a major success, that we should be grateful for those 6 months on a toxic treatment that leaves us unable to parent our children, unable to bear children at all. That we aren’t arguing strongly enough and that’s why we’re dying. That we should just join a clinical trial, that if we don’t we can’t expect any breakthroughs, even though we don’t actually qualify for any trials because we have brain mets and we’re too heavily pretreated, and even if we did, we don’t live in New York or Houston or Boston where most of the trials are. 

That there’s exciting research happening on our corpses.

So many excuses for why Maria is dead. Why Michelle is dead. Why Seporah is dead. Why Lisa is dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.

How many more of us have to die before someone does something to stop this? How many more tears must we shed before someone listens? When will the excuses and the patient-blaming end? When will there be a sense of urgency? When will all this death stop?

I don’t know how much more of this my heart can take before it’s permanently broken. Before I can’t pick myself up and keep fighting and fighting and begging for help.

HELP US. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, SOMEONE HELP US.

9 thoughts on “Maria”

  1. So upsetting. The dying has got to stop. The lack of progress cuts deep. Your point about the money spent on terrorism when we are losing so many loved ones is very powerful. What a hard shock to end the week after meeting so many great people and hear of Maria’s death. There are no words…Sending you love.❤❤❤

  2. My Dr G, who has treated me since the beginning in 1999, now says all the time that we have to be loud, or they’ll never hear us. I say, women have only gotten ahead in the modern world after we stopped trying to be “good girls” and did what was necessary. We got citizenship, we got the vote, and we can get the research needed if THEY START HEARING US.
    Jill Cohen recently posted…A Story Half Told: Life with Metastatic CancerMy Profile

  3. I know the whirlwind in your brain right now. I need to get my oomph back, because she shouldn’t be dead. I don’t want to be dead. Every day it hangs over our heads. Let’s find a cure!
    Mandi recently posted…InsomniacMy Profile

  5. I don’t know…I wish I believed it would happen in our lifetime. I’m sorry for your losses… I hope you will treat yourself well…Courage my friend.
    Gail (12+ yrs since Stage IV diagnosis, still bones only)

  6. So many of us dying.
    The other day a friend of mine said to me, “I’m so sorry.” And I was confused… “besides the obvious, any particular reason you’re sorry for me today?” And she said, “I saw those FB posts about your friend who passed away and the other one in hospice.” And I said, “Oh, yea, that. That’s just an average day for me.”
    This is going to sound horrible, but when the whole Paris thing happened, at first I felt very sad, but as the whole world started talking about it, putting up French flags, donating money, etc. I felt something less nice. I felt invisible and angry. 130 people died in Paris that day, another ~90 seriously injured. Tragic. Do you know how many people die of lung cancer in the US alone, on that day and EVERY OTHER DAMN DAY OF THE YEAR? 438. Can we get a little help over here, too, for fuck’s sake?
    Lisa recently posted…Guest Blog: “Dear Lung Cancer Patient Who Didn’t Smoke”My Profile

    1. When I think about how much we spend on anti-terrorism per life lost, vs. how much we spend on cancer research per life lost, I want to scream.

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