Need advice, sensitive and strange situation

I hesitate to jump in on this, but I don't see any reason why she isn't telling the truth about her cancer.

It sounds like she's living well with metastatic breast cancer, and responding to treatment well. That's good.

Hopefully more people will chime in with their experiences. Best wishes.

You might want to check into a psychological disorder called Munchausin Syndrome. Not saying she has it, but what you wrote is curious.

I'm with edj here. "Gently and with compassion, this isn't yours to solve or fix."

It's not entirely out of the realm of possibility. Two years ago I was given 60 days to live but had a "miraculous" response to chemo, I've been dealing with constant progression for the last 18 months and the cancer is still growing, but if you met me on the street you would never have any idea because somehow my body is staying incredibly healthy otherwise and I look as good as most "healthy" women my age, but the truth is that I'm so tired I want to cry most of the time. I often think how ironic it is that outwardly I look so well when I have more active cancer than most, and my friends who have only a small amount of active cancer seem to be in much worse shape physically. I'm not exactly out running marathons, but there are women in the Stage IV forum who are. In fact there's an entire thread in the Stage IV forum for people leading very active lives - hiking, running, biking, etc. Staying physically active is very important for us, both physically and mentally.

You asked if there are drugs that make the mets disappear. Yes, I was Stage IV de novo with mets in my liver and all throughout my skeleton (too many to count per oncologist). My initial treatment - taxol, herceptin, perjeta - have completely resolved my liver and bone mets. But mets keep popping up in new places (although not in as many organs as Karen has had). Radiation can often clear up mets too. For example if she had one or two small mets in her bones, radiation could clear those spots up.

A lot of it depends on what chemo drugs she claims to have done, and what trials (experimental drugs) she claimed to be in. Not all chemo drugs all cause hair loss, they don't all cause nausea and vomiting, and each of us reacts differently to the drugs. Even more, the first time I did Taxol it affected me the way you would expect from a chemo, but the second time I had hardly any side effects at all.

Typically at Stage IV one would stay on a drug until there's further progression, which would mean that the drug stopped working. I guess I could see her oncologist stopping a chemo if it completely resolved her mets, but if she's in a trial (experimental drugs), one would typically stay in the trial until progression (or trial is completed, typically years), so it would be surprising if she was in so many different drug trials in such a short time. I would also be skeptical about the claim that almost her entire liver was involved but it took only 6 weeks for them to completely resolve. And brain lesions, since not many drugs cross the blood brain barrier, most people have some sort of radiation (either cyberknife or whole brain radiation) for that reason. The only experimental drug trial for brain mets that I'm aware of right now is HER2Climb. If she's HER2+ and on Herceptin with or without Perjeta (targeted therapy) in between the chemo drugs, she could be leading a very full and active life, most of us find that H&P is very tolerable once we get used to it.

For some women, they react as if any small progression is dire and their life is over. Progression is never good, but it's not always the end of the world. It could be that she is having small progressions (small mets) and maybe she or her family is worried about the worst, but she's having a good response to every new line of treatment she tries. Maybe her liver wasn't completely involved, but maybe she developed one or two small mets that put everyone into a panic. And maybe instead of being in so many drug trials for "experimental drugs" she just means that her oncologist said that this is the next (standard) one we'll "try". They never promise that it will work, in some ways it's all experimental because we keep trying different drugs until we find one that works.

Anyway, I'd be inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt for now. We'd need more specific information to know for sure if she was making up stories, and sometimes when you hear things second- or third-hand it's not always entirely accurate.

I’m not insulted, because you don’t know me and are not accusing me to my face of faking. And I see that you realize that to say something and be wrong would be a very bad thing. The thing to know, and the thing that is hard for muggles to understand, is that you can’t tell by looking, and some people with cancer hide their many difficulties. I’ve had stage iv for five years, and if I had ten bucks for every “You look great” I could pay my deductible. That said, cancer fakery is not unheard of. Now your daughter and SIL are adults, and I don’t see how it would be so very devastating if it eventually it comes out that this lady has been faking and therefore has a different sort of problem.