By the time Kudirka was diagnosed, the cancer had already metastasized to her sternum, spine, and pelvis. Thankfully, the subtype of cancer Kudirka has responded well to a “targeted therapy” drug called Herceptin , and after several months of treatment and a double mastectomy, she found out she had “no evidence of disease” or NED , which means her tumors are no longer visible on scans. This is the best news anyone with MBC can hope for at this point. Kudirka is not considered “cured” — NED simply means that her disease is undetectable by currently available tests.Like any person with stage IV, Kudirka will continue to take oral medications or receive intravenous treatments every few weeks or months for the rest of her life. “There’s no light at the end of the tunnel,” she says. “I have to go into the hospital every single week. I have to plan everything around this appointment for these drugs that keep me alive, but also make me sick, and make it so I can’t dance or live my life.” That’s because, though the tumors are gone, rogue cancer cells may still be in her body, and there’s no way to know for sure how many are still circulating. These may take root later and grow into new tumors. In all likelihood, her cancer will come back, and the odds are on sooner rather than later.“I met my first patient with breast cancer when I was 26, in the 1980s, and for me it was really striking how many young women were in the hospital dying of metastatic breast cancer,” says Matthew Ellis, MD, PhD , a breast cancer physician and metastasis researcher at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “Thirty years later, women do better, but it’s still the number-one cause of death from disease in women between the ages of 25 and 50. Metastatic breast cancer takes women in the prime of their lives, and we still don’t have a solution for it.”We’ve raised huge sums of money to support breast cancer awareness and research — the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure program alone, which is arguably one of the most visible breast cancer fundraisers, has generated nearly a billion dollars since it began in the early '80s — yet a true, life-saving cure for breast cancer eludes us.The reasons why are complex. Partly, it’s that breast cancer (and cancer in general) is an inexorable foe. Metastatic cancer adapts, like a virus, and it seems to be more adaptable and hardier than other cancers. “Cancer cells that have moved from breast tissue to other organs have not only survived all the different poisons used to treat the original tumor, but have had to adapt and make so many changes to be able to survive in a completely new tissue environment,” says researcher Barbara Fingleton, PhD , who studies metastasis at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville. These metastatic tumors continue to evolve, often becoming resistant to medications that appear to work at first. “Every time we throw a new treatment at metastatic cancer, different cancer cells grow out. It’s like a virus or parasite that will do whatever it takes to survive,” she says. Asking why we don’t have a cure for breast cancer, then, is kind of like asking why don’t we have a cure for cancer, period.But it can also be argued that we’ve been blinded by the pink — that it’s easier to believe that breast cancer has been “fixed.” That desire for everything to be warm, fuzzy, and okay has led to a lack of awareness for the deadliest form of breast cancer, says Champagne Joy , an MBC patient and the creator and founder of the hashtag-turned-non-profit #Cancerland . “All those smiling, pink-turbaned women going across the finish line of the 5Ks, [these images are] an overall misportrayal of the disease,” Joy says. “Many women who are diagnosed at early-stage don’t even realize they are at risk for [metastasis, which is terminal.]”