Episode Overview

What happens when you're told you have 12 months or less to live, and six years later, you're still here?

On October 11, 2020, I received the news that I had stage four metastatic breast cancer. Not long after, my doctor signed paperwork giving me a prognosis of 12 months or less.

On October 11, 2026, I celebrated six years of living beyond that diagnosis.

But this episode isn't just about surviving six years. It's about what I've learned about identity, belief, fear, and choosing how I want to live, even when my health feels uncertain.

I'm sharing what it means to stop identifying only as a cancer patient, how I've learned to recognize when fear is driving my choices, and why believing in healing doesn't mean ignoring medical care or pretending everything is okay.

We'll also talk about the daily practices that help me stay connected to the woman I'm becoming, why our beliefs about money and receiving support matter, and how visualization, belief, and action work together in creating a life we love.

And I'm inviting you into a very personal vision of a celebration I hope to have one day, surrounded by my family, friends, disco balls, tacos, and three beautiful letters: NED. No evidence of disease.

I don't know exactly what the road ahead will look like. But I do know that I get to decide how I show up for myself along the way.

You are more than a diagnosis, a prognosis, or a statistic. And you get to keep becoming the woman you want to be.

Resources Mentioned:

Download for iPhone: 

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kajabi/id1485646310

Download for Android: 

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=kajabi.kajabiapp&hl=en_US

Work with Laura:
https://www.thebreastcancerrecoverycoach.com/health 

Let’s Connect!
If this episode helped you breathe a little easier, please share it with a friend or leave a review. Every share helps spread this message of hope, healing, and whole-person wellness.

💌 Join my email list for weekly wellness tips & podcast updates → The Breast Cancer Recovery Coach

💌 Join the Better Than Before Breast Cancer Life Coaching Membership → Life Coaching

💌 Join the Living Well After Breast Cancer Community → The Living Well After Breast Cancer Community

👩‍💻 Follow me on Instagram for daily inspiration → @thebreastcancerrecoverycoach

👩‍💻 Follow me on Facebook → The Breast Cancer Recovery Coach

🎙 Subscribe & leave a review on Apple Podcasts → Better Than Before Breast Cancer with The Breast Cancer Recovery Coach

🎥 Watch on YouTube → @BetterThanBeforeBreastCancer

Read the full transcript:

0:00
You're listening to Better Than Before Breast Cancer with the Breast Cancer Recovery Coach. I'm your host Laura Lummer. I'm a certified life coach, and I'm a breast cancer thriver. In this podcast, I will give you the skills, on the insides, and the tools to move past the emotional and physical trauma of a breast cancer diagnosis. If you're looking for a way to create a life that's even better than before breast cancer, you've come to the right place. Let's get started. october 11, 2020. That was the day when I got the phone call telling me that I had stage four metastatic breast cancer, within a few days, I found out that it was very widespread. And a short time later, my doctor signed the paperwork saying that I had 12 months or less to live. And I remember processing that news and making a decision that it didn't apply to me; that I was going to find a way to heal. Last Sunday was october 11, 2026. Six years later, and I'm still here. Welcome to episode 485 of Better Than Before Breast Cancer. I am Laura Lummer, your breast cancer recovery coach, and today's episode is a celebration, and it's also very personal, a little bit vulnerable, and I hope by the end that it will give you a spark of possibility for your own life, wherever you're at, whatever your scans say. However long it's been since you heard the news that you had breast cancer, and before we even start, I want to ask you something: Has anyone ever handed you a timeline, a statistic, a prognosis, and at some point you decided that you would own it, whatever it was that they said to you, and you decided to incorporate it as if it was going to be part of who you are. If you did, there's nothing wrong with that because I've been there too, and this episode is a little bit also about how I have let go of that identity a little bit at a time, and I'm still in the process of doing that, and that leads us to where I was on my six-year life anniversary from stage four cancer. I wasn't in an infusions chair or in a scan. Thank God, I was at a conference called Rewire Your Mind Rich with my beautiful daughter Brooke, with my dear friend Alina, one of my closest and oldest friends, been around longer than my daughter has, and I was so happy to be there and so grateful to get to share this event with the two of them because this conference was about manifestation, not the fairy dust type of manifestation, but the real steps you take to create a life you love, and how to let go of the limiting beliefs that keep you from it. And most of all, it takes me back to identity. It was about identity, about the identities that we hold on to sometimes without even realizing or noticing, and the ones that we have to let go of if we want to step into who we are becoming. And on that day, having the people who love me sitting next to me on either side of me, choosing to believe right along with me, I really can't fully describe what that meant to me. It was really, really powerful. And let's talk a little bit. I want to share with you what identity means for me, you know. For a long time, I think, especially after my first diagnosis, I think I carried the identity of cancer patient, cancer survivor, and I think that when we're living with appointment scans, lab draws, even creating a business around supporting women who are recovering from breast cancer, you start to get that identity. Even if I was holding on to it, that other people would project it onto me. And I'll tell you, there's been in this last year, since about last December, a big shift because I started to realize over the course of 2025, as I was doing a lot of work with the metabolic approach to wellness with my clients, and I was working with several other clients that were dealing with stage four breast cancer.

Laura Lummer 4:09
I started to realize that there was a lot of fear behind the choices these people were making, even though the steps they were taking were steps to try to improve their health and to save their lives, but there was a lot of fear-based work in that for each of them. And then I started to feel a little bit of that heaviness from their work. We would have our sessions, and it would kind of transfer to me a little bit. I'd feel the heaviness, and I have my own practice to kind of let it go-a little bit of saging myself, a little bit of prayer, a little bit of you know, let me be the portal for these people and be here and be of service and what you know, take on that heaviness. But I couldn't help but notice the fear and the work that I had to do to step away from that, to step away from other people's stories becoming my story, and from me slipping a little. Into fear as well. In March of 2026, I started having some health issues. I started suffering, as I've shared on the podcast a couple of times. I started having a lot of pain. I've been having some issues with the nerves in my cervical spine. I've been dealing with shortness of breath. I've been dealing with pain and lack of mobility, on and off since March on a couple of hospitalizations, and of course, my family was concerned, and I understand their concerns. But one of the things that I started to notice, and I'm going to share with you this part of my story, but think about where this might apply to you in your life, and in any kind of challenges or difficulties that come up in your life. So, it it I think this kind of transfers across all barriers in life, but for me, it was specific to my health. And because I was having some issues, I was getting more and more phone calls, more and more text messages. What did this doctor say? What did that doctor say? What about the fluid and chest? What about the pain? What's happening? And then I was feeling a lot of frustration because, as I'm repeating this information, and I have a big family, so as I'm repeating this information to people, it's almost like taking on the identity, right? It's like when you're speaking to somebody and they say, "My cancer. I'm very careful never to say that, right? I don't want my cancer. My identity is somebody who is healed from metastatic breast cancer. So over the course of this year, as I've been going through some of these health challenges, and as the people who love me ask about it, I was really looking for a way, like how can I communicate with them in a positive way without repeating this story over and over? Because it's almost like repeating to yourself this identity. This is happening to me, right? This pain is going on. This shortness of breath is happening to me, and I don't want to continue to reinforce that. So when we're talking about identity, I think that it goes across many different realms and many different layers. So for me, if I'm trying to put energy into something as powerful and meaningful as healing and as believing I can heal, I can't always be talking about what's not heading towards the ultimate goal of healing. Right, that is kind of something that it becomes an identity, and then people start to see it. And that, as if you listen this podcast, you know I'm a big believer in energy, right? So that energy is being directed at me, and then if I'm discussing it, that energy is coming from me about me, and I can't have that, right? I have to continually practice something else and not allow myself to be attached to that identity of the cancer patient, and so I did notice that I started to pull back a little bit. If there were going to be you know big crowds, or I would say, you know what, I'm going to say this to one family member. Could you just tell everybody else about it? Here's everything you need to know because I don't want to keep repeating that.

Laura Lummer 7:57
And how I say this transfers to anybody in their life is about anything. So if you're upset with a child, a life partner, a spouse, a friend, work, anything like that, and you keep talking about it again and again, if you bring it up over and over, you recreate that energy, right? And you recreate that identity of I'm this person who's angry. I'm this person who's resentful. They are that person who's dishonest, or they are that person who's closed off. So we have to really be very careful about our language and the way that we create our identity and the way that we create the identity for people around us. So what's important to me, yes, is to believe that I'm the woman who has healed from metastatic breast cancer, but I also want to be really clear about something. This is not delusional. When I, as I said a minute ago, I'm not talking about manifestation of fairy dust kind of manifestation. I'm talking about the neuroscience of belief, and so that doesn't mean that I just go. Oh, I believe I've healed, and I leave it at that. I take massive action behind becoming that person, and that's the real science of manifestation. I give credit to my oncologist. I give credit to medicine. I love him. I'm grateful for standard of care medicine, and I love my integrative oncologist, and I'm grateful for her knowledge in the emotional processing and supplements, and I'm grateful for all of the studies and all of the mentorship that I've had in nutrition. All of it comes together in this beautiful process of stepping into that future version of myself, that woman that I am constantly becoming. And trust me, over six years, it's not all been easy. It's not all been linear. Over the last six years, I've had four different lines of treatment, and lately, with all that's been going on, it looks like the treatment that I'm on now is maybe starting to fail, and that I'm going to have to start another line of treatment. And so, when that happens, it's not always easy to believe that healing is possible. And this is why I invest in myself and in conferences and in practices and in skills that reinforce my ability to believe in the life that I am creating. Believing that healing is possible is something I have to practice every single day, just like getting up and brushing your teeth every single morning. I get up and I write down what I believe. I write down what I want. I visualize, and I'll share a visualization with you at the end of this show and ask you actually to share in it with me. So when I'm talking about becoming the future version of myself-it's not something that I just do once, check it off, and say, "Okay, that's dumb. It's something that requires a lot of work, intention, and attention. And especially because we live in a world full of fear, our brains not only have a built-in negative bias, and they're designed to scan for danger and grab onto whatever can go wrong as a part of our own survival system, but we've got conditioning from the time we were children. We are taught to be afraid. Don't do that; you'll get hurt. Be careful. Don't get your hopes up. Right? Don't get too excited in case something goes wrong. We don't want you to be disappointed. Careful to to fall in love because you might get hurt, right? We're constantly being conditioned to be in fear, and although I believe most of that comes from loving intention, people who raised us want us to be safe. People who care about us don't want to see us get hurt. But when we live in that much fear, we live with anxiety and we live with limiting beliefs. Then layer a cancer diagnosis on top of that, put you into a medical system that speaks the language of fear, statistics, median survival timelines, paperwork, stats, right? And when you're in a world like that, and then you decide you're going to believe something bigger than the people around you are able to believe, then they can sometimes think you're the one who's lost touch with reality. You're delusional. You're in denial, and that doesn't just apply to me and and my desire and my vision of healing.

Laura Lummer 12:10
Again, that goes across the board. What if you want to be an excellent pottery? What do you call a pottery person? A potterer, a pottery creator. What if you want to learn how to sing, play guitar, write a book? What if you want to be in the best shape of your life and you're 55 years old? Right. When we decide to have a dream that goes beyond other people's limiting beliefs, it's difficult for them to buy into it. So it's more important, even more important, for you to be able to believe in yourself, so I think an important question to ask yourself is: Whose fear are you still carrying around that was never yours to begin with? I decided I am not going to carry around the fear of my oncologist. I'm going to leave that fear to him. He gets to be afraid. He gets to worry about me while I live my life, and that's how I think of healing as a partnership with my doctor. He has his part, medicine projections, thinking about what could be happening based on his expertise, and I have my part. My part is learning to love myself, and I mean really loving myself, so that everything I do to support my healing comes from love and not from fear. That includes the way I care for my body, everything I put on my plate, how I tend to my relationships, how I invest in my spiritual beliefs and relationships, how I decide to tend to my sleep, wake up in the morning, see the sunshine, how committed I am to those practices, and that I ensure that that commitment is based in love and healing. And this is why that matters. Two women can drink the same green smoothie. One drinks it thinking I have to, or cancer is going to grow. The other drinks it thinking I'm nourishing my body from love with this, and that same smoothie is going to be a very different experience in the body because the body is in a different state if it's in fear or if it's in love. When we live in chronic fear, our bodies stay in fight or flight. Stress hormones stay up. That affects our sleep, our digestion, our blood sugar, inflammation, immune function. These are the same areas we're working so hard to support by doing all the things, and so when we act from a place of love and safety, the body gets the chance to move into rest and repair. So it's really important to be very aware and ask yourself honestly: Is your nutrition choice, is your green smoothie, an act of love or an act of fear or panic. So let me talk. I get a lot of questions about this. What does that look like for you, Laura? So I've shared some of this on the show before, but let me talk about what that looks like for me. So my practice every day, I set my alarm for 530 in the morning. Sometimes I don't get up till 545 or 6o'clock. I try to get up at 530. And I get up at 530, not because I want to get out of bed and hit the day running. I hate doing that, so I wake up at 530 so I can get up slowly. My husband has already made coffee. I get my coffee. I come back to bed and I write in my journal. My scribe is my journal, so I use my scribe, my Kindle scribe, and I write in it what I'm working on manifesting in my life what my focus is. The first one being having no evidence of disease, being a person who is healed from metastatic breast cancer. So I write it down. I sit and I close my eyes and I just allow myself to be absorbed in the energy of gratitude. Oh, let me go back. When I wake up, the first thing I do is open my windows and open my blinds, so that when the sun comes up, I get to watch the sunrise. So first thing I want to see is sunshine. Then I go get my coffee. Then I come back. Then I start my practice, and I close my eyes, and I just feel like how grateful I am that I woke up today.

Laura Lummer 15:59
How grateful I am that I'm in a safe place, a warm bed, a comfortable home. I have a wonderful husband who makes coffee for me in the morning. I get to see the sun come up. I have my vision, right? I go through this practice of just saying, "I'm so grateful for this life. I have so much gratitude for every single thing in this life, and I finish up my cup of coffee. I get myself up and get dressed, go for my walk on the beach, or go to a spin class, or whatever it is I'm able to do on that day. And sometimes lately, it's just lay on the floor and do a lot of stretching. But I do something to connect to my body and some breath work. Now I want to just interject something here for a minute, because I talk a lot about belief and I talk about manifesting this, and I think it's important to acknowledge that everything I do and everything I talk about, maybe it's going to work and maybe not. I believe wholeheartedly that it is going to work, but as I've said, this hasn't been linear. I've had ups and downs. I've had progressions over the years, and it appears that I may be in another progression right now. But even when that happens, I decide to believe that this is just a bump in the road. As an old boss and now good friend of mine used to say, just another rock in the river. And I'm like, okay, I'll get through this, and I will figure this out. And I decide that I want to believe and trust. When I get a progression, I don't judge myself. If something goes and I have to change medicines, if something, if I need to, you know, get an extra scan and it shows that something else lit up, I don't judge myself. I don't say I didn't believe hard enough. And I want to be really clear that that is not what I'm saying here on this podcast. I am not saying that whatever it is you want to believe in your life, if it doesn't happen, it's not your fault it didn't happen, right? When we choose to believe, when we choose to put energy and intention into something, it's going to happen in its own time. But the the choice to believe helps us to show up consistently for ourselves in the way we choose and decide to show up, and that's the important part, right? So this is what we're talking about when we say, "Don't be attached to the outcome. We can decide on the outcome, but we don't know what the process and the journey is going to look like getting to that outcome. No matter where you are in your life, no matter what the thing is that you're working towards, okay. So it's not about you didn't believe hard enough, you didn't love yourself enough. We believe in it, and we love ourselves to make choices from love. So we have an excellent quality of life as we're working on showing up for ourselves. So belief isn't a pass or fail test. Cancer life is complicated, and and and it isn't linear. And belief isn't a Willy Wonka golden ticket. I wish it was. It's just how I choose to live while I do the things that I do because it shapes the way that I feel and want to feel in my days. It shapes the way that I show up in my day. It shapes the way that I get through the really challenging parts of my life, and some of them are really fucking challenging. So, healing life, healing the body, healing relationships, healing your relationship with finances and money-nothing is linear, right? It's more like a roller coaster, and it's more like a roller coaster with a bunch of loop the loops in it. So we have to prepare to have some woohoo. And so I'm like, oh my god, my heart is in my stomach. Right, this is just how it goes. But no matter where we're at on the roller coaster, or if we get stuck hanging upside down in the loop, the loop, we still get to decide to show up for ourselves. That's the point here. My job isn't to control the ride.

Laura Lummer 19:41
My job is to keep showing up consistently and hold the belief that I'm going to safely get out on the other end of that ride. So I want to talk about something too that I think is really important, and that is that money matters on this path, and I don't think we talk about. That enough, especially in the world of investing in ourselves as women, in the world of taking care of ourselves after a breast cancer diagnosis. I bring it up now and then, but I think we really need to be open to talking about this. And if you've been through a diagnosis, which probably have if you're listening to me now, you know this. You may be like I was, and have thought, well, I've got insurance, that's fine. And then you got a diagnosis and realize how fast copays add up, how fast medicines how add up, how fast the integrative approach, naturopathic doctors, homeopathic doctors, supplements, specialized labs, integrative practitioners, money matters. And so I have really dug into and really come to believe that our beliefs about money are just as important as our beliefs about healing. We have to believe that we can find the resources to support our healing in the way we believe we deserve, and that we can bring into our lives the things we deserve for ourselves, the things we believe will help us, and so I've got a little confession. Actually, when I decided to go to the Rewire Your Mind Rich, I felt weird about posting about it. I really did. I hesitated, and I I noticed my reluctancy, that that resistance that I had, and I thought about it, and I realized that I had my own limiting belief, along with some fear of judgment, right? And my limiting belief was mostly over that word, rich. And I started to think, wow, that's interesting. That I had this this limiting idea that people think rich is a bad word, and that kind of surprised me because I know from my own life and from so many women that I've coached how much financial resources affect our options and how we feel about our care. And I don't want my healing limited because of money. I don't want your healing limited because of money. I don't want our lives limited because of money. And what is important here is the willingness to receive. So it isn't only about earning money, right? Some of us are working, some of us aren't, some of us can't right now, and that's okay wherever you're at. Part of abundance is being willing to receive, and we can receive through many, many avenues. There, I have received help through my six years in from from family members who are so loving and so gracious and so generous, and it's it's maybe saved my life in a couple of instances, allowed me to go in deeper and work with naturopathic doctors that have really helped me a lot. So the openness and the willingness to receive and believe that we are surrounded by abundance, help and gifts and support and opportunities. People want to show up for us, and are we willing to receive that? I think that's a that in itself is richness. Relationships and people that care about you that is rich. So rich doesn't just mean that I have a whole bunch of money in the bank and and finances are never an issue for me. I can have whatever I want, right? Rich is so much deeper than that, and I believe rich is personal development as well. You know, so rich doesn't just mean money, but an abundance of money to be able to support you wherever you want the support in your life is important. I think it's deserving to be talked about, and it's interesting to look at the limiting beliefs in it and the ideas we have about where we might be judged if we talk about it. I believe that our natural state, that our birthright, is a state of abundance and wellness. And I think that when we step out of fear and into the possibility that this is available to us, that life opens up in ways we could not even have planned or thought of, and I've seen that happen to people around me and for myself.

Laura Lummer 23:47
So another thing to think about: Where are you telling yourself you can't afford to heal the way you want to, or you can't afford to live the way you want to? And is that a fact, or is it a limiting belief? And if it's just a belief, if it's just an idea, if it's just a thought, what would you like to believe instead? And that's why I went to this conference. That's one of the reasons why. For me, going to conferences like Rewire Your Mind Rich is like going to the gym for my brain. This is what I tell my clients all the time. We must continue to go to the gym for our brain. We listen to the stories of people who've overcome adversity and designed lives they love with abundance in their spiritual life, their relationships, their relationships with people, their relationships with money, and feeding their mind in the way that you want it to grow. So let's dig a little bit into manifestation because I know that word makes a lot of people roll their eyes, and I've mentioned this already, but I'm going to say it again. This is not the fairy dust type of manifestation that you may hear from a lot of your woo woo people or some woo woo influencers. This isn't making a wish, blowing on a dandelion, and sitting on the couch and waiting for your life to change. I'm talking about the kind of manifestation. Station that has real backing in how our brains work, and when you give your brain a very clear picture of what you're creating, it starts to filter that for you. You start to notice opportunities, people, choices that line up with the vision that you're holding. You make decisions as the person who already lives that life. You create the vision. You add the belief you take, the action. That combination-vision, belief, action-that's how I've changed my life entirely from what it looked like six years ago. It's how I build a business that I love while carrying from my body and working on healing from stage four cancer, and it's how I keep reconnecting with what I want to create in this world. So I said earlier, I'm going to share a vision with you, and I want to share this visualization with you because I ask you bring some energy to this visualization for me. If you could send your energy into this visual for me, I believe it will make it that much more powerful, and it will become real that much faster. So let's picture this. I have a sister named Christy. She has the party house, right? I have a big family. She has a huge backyard and those big white tents that you see at weddings. And my visualization is the tents are all up out in her backyard. It's a beautiful, warm evening in Southern California. The tables are out. Everything is decorated in silver and gold. Silver and gold balloons. I love sparkly things, so there's sparkle everywhere. There's metallic mylar balloons. There's clear balloons filled with glitter confetti that catch the light. There's disco balls hanging from the tent poles that are just like scattering little dots of color around everyone's faces and on the walls of the tents, and on my chair, over my head, there's three big silver mylar balloons, and they are giant letters. You know the kind people get for milestone birthdays; they get the numbers. Mine are letters, and those letters are N, E, D. No evidence of disease. We've got a taco guy there because we always have a taco guy for our big taco nights and our big celebrations. So we've got a taco guy. He's doing all the cooking. He's going to do all the cleanup. All we do is feast and celebrate. My husband is there. My children are there. My sisters are there. My mom is there. Friends are coming and going all night. I get to hug all the people and express my gratitude for the love and support that they have carried for me. We laugh. We cry. We eat. We celebrate the scan results. Like what a miraculous outcome! N E D. I believe this is true for me. See, this is important. You got to feel it.

Laura Lummer 27:46
I feel the relief, and when I do that visualization in the mornings, I can feel the tears of just gratitude, and that's important. It's important when we're believing something and bringing something into our life that we feel the emotion that comes with it. And when I hold that belief and I show up as the woman who's already lived it, I believe it is done. And even if I hear from my doctor that I have a setback, I say, "Okay, this is another rock in the river. But I hold on to that vision. So I ask, "Will you put some of your energy into that vision with me? Picture those balloons. Picture me under the disco ball, tacos on my plate, and celebrating being a woman who's healed from metastatic breast cancer. So, as you hold that vision and we go through this week, I want you to just think about something. Finish this sentence: I am no longer what? What is the identity you're willing to put down? And I am a woman who fill in the blank. In order to pick up that new identity, you're gonna have to sit one down. What does that look like for you? And if you want some help with that, come to my website, thebreastcancerrecoverycoach.com. Join my Better Than Before Breast Cancer membership, where we can work together to help you become that woman. All right, friends. I'll talk to you again next week. Until then, be good to yourself, and expect others to be good to you as well. Take care.