“The flower that blooms in adversity is the rarest and most beautiful of all.” – Mulan

In the past year, I’ve learned that 30% of people diagnosed with breast cancer at any stage will develop distal metastasis–which is Stage 4 cancer, the non-curable kind. I don’t believe that I truly would have understood exactly what this means, if it wasn’t for the amazing blogs I have read this past year. There is a group of very brave and courageous people who are facing their metastatic cancers head on and sharing their experiences via their blogs, truly educating us about life and death. These blogs tear out my heart, make me laugh, make me think. They are inspirational and profound. They are beautiful. Their authors are beautiful.

These wonderful blogs include:

The Sarcastic Boob is determined to manage breast cancer with the same level of sarcasm with which she manages everything else.

Telling Knots where “medicine and psych, Middle East and politics, words and languages, religion and spirituality [are] wrapping thread around air. Also, I have stage IV breast cancer.”

Lisa Bonchek Adams is very close in age to myself and writes regularly for the Huffington Post.

Breast Cancer? But Doctor…I hate pink! So do I.

The following writers have died of cancer in the past year, but their stories live on through their blogs:

Donna Peach, who danced “through life’s adventure with breast cancer,” was born and raised in Michigan–like me.

Cindy Bellinger was known to “wield a chainsaw like a logger and write poetry that breaks people’s hearts” She wrote about her cancer at the My Cancer Chronicles.