Thriving Together 2026: From Silent Voices to Hear My Voice - 20 Years of the LBBC’s MBC Conference
“This is a disease no one wants, but you meet the best people."
Twenty years ago, about 125 people gathered at a hotel outside Philadelphia for the first-ever conference just for those living with metastatic breast cancer, at a time when the community was rarely seen or heard. Today, it's a three-day national event drawing hundreds of attendees and a virtual audience.
In this episode, the host Victoria Goldberg sits down with three longtime Living Beyond Breast Cancer leaders: CEO Jean Sachs; Elyse Spatz Caplan, who ended her 14-year tenure with LBBC as the Director of Programs and Partnerships; and Catherine Ormerod, a retired Executive Vice President for Strategy and Mission. In a separate conversation, she speaks with Janine Guglielmino, LBBC's former Vice President of Mission Delivery, who was there for that very first conference in 2006.
Thriving Together 2026: LBBC's MBC Conference Through Our Eyes
"You walk into a room full of people living with metastatic breast cancer and you just... break down. Not because it's sad — though it is — but because for the first time, you're not alone in it."
Twenty years in, LBBC's Thriving Together Conference is still doing what no other event in the MBC space does: bringing patients together not just to learn, but to find each other. In this episode, four MBC patients who attended the 2026 conference share what moved them, what the science is saying, and why they'll keep coming back.
Stage 4 Living: Palliative Care is Not Hospice with Dr. Mary Busowski
Palliative care is not hospice — and that one misconception is keeping cancer patients from getting support they desperately need. Dr. Mary Busowski, palliative care physician at Orlando Health, joins our hosts Abigail Johnston and Amy Russell-Parliman o set the record straight and make the case for getting palliative care involved from day one.
S**t We Deal With Shorts: Time Burden with Dr. Jill Tirabassi
"You hear things like, 'living with cancer is a full-time job.' And actually this was an interesting study where we looked to see what truly is the time burden for people living with either metastatic breast or ovarian cancer... The time spent waiting and traveling for care often exceeded the amount of time receiving care. Most days, participants had a home cancer-related task to do—80% of days. The median was about 209 minutes per week doing cancer related tasks at home."
— Dr. Jill Tirabassi explores new research quantifying the invisible labor of living with metastatic cancer