Puzzled

The death of Elizabeth Edwards has thrown my online breast cancer community into a frenzy. Post after post articulating SHOCK that she could die of breast cancer. "Isn't Stage IV a chronic disease?" "But it was only in her bones." Now, from the general public, I can understand these responses, but from the Stage IV community? What are they thinking?

Breast cancer once it has left the breast and metastized is terminal. End of story. There are treatments to hold back the terminal part, but eventually all of us with metastized breast cancer will die of it. [Okay, technically we could fall of a cliff first in which case we died of something else.]

I simply don't understand this universal denial of what Stage IV means. Elizabeth Edwards is certainly not the only woman this year to have died from breast cancer. On these very same boards we have lost so many wonderful women this year. None of them fell off of a cliff.