S**t We Deal With Shorts: Time Burden with Dr. Jill Tirabassi

Living with metastatic breast cancer isn't just about medical treatments—it's a significant time commitment that impacts every aspect of daily life. In this episode of "S**T We Deal With Shorts," Dr. Jill Tirabassi examines a 2025 JAMA Network Open study that quantifies exactly how much time patients with metastatic breast and ovarian cancer spend managing their disease.

The research reveals eye-opening statistics: patients averaged one out-of-home cancer-related visit per week, with travel and wait times often exceeding actual care time. At home, cancer-related tasks consumed a median of 209 minutes per week—from taking medications to managing medical bills and scheduling appointments. For over one-third of participants, these demands disrupted their daily activities more than half the time.

While most patients in the study spent 5-15 hours per week on cancer-related care—not quite the "full-time job" often described—the burden is far from insignificant. Jill brings her dual perspective as both a physician and someone living with MBC to explore how treatment lines, side effects, and care logistics impact our time and lives.

This episode validates what many in the MBC community already know: managing advanced cancer requires substantial time and energy beyond what appears on any scan or lab result.

Article: Time Burden in Patients with Metastatic Breast and Ovarian Cancer From Clinic and Home Demands,JAMA Network Open, December 2025

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the episode, subscribe and leave a review — it really helps. Follow us on social media @livefromstage4 and visit our website at www.livefromstage4.org for show notes and links.

 Your support helps us continue to share important stories and advocate for those living with metastatic breast cancer.

Until next time, take care and keep pushing for progress.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:10

Could if you are foot and surf the close to the new thing, we'll come to life from stage four, where MBC takes center stage as we talk to experts, share inspiring stories, break down signs, and shine the spotlight on what matters most. Because when it comes down to it, the spot, for us and by us, is all about us. Hi friends, I'm Victoria Goldberg. We're excited to introduce a new series of short segments that we're calling Should We Deal With. As our very colorful title implies, these episodes tackle the real challenges we as people living with metastatic breast cancer have to face on a regular basis and research around everyday living with this disease. Jill Tarabasi, a member of our podcast team, and a sports medicine and preventive medicine boarded physician, who is also living with NBC, hosts, introduces, and writes these segments. Jill brings her medical expertise and personal experience to explore topics that matter to our community. Let's hear from Jill.

SPEAKER_02 1:33

Hello, my name is Jill Terabasi, and welcome to our segment called Should We Deal with Shorts, where we talk about topics that unfortunately we have to deal with because we are now living with metastatic breast cancer. I will dive into research, literature, whatever else is out there to try to find some answers and quantify what the data shows about what we're dealing with. In today's shit we deal with shorts, we are going to talk about time burden. I'm pulling this topic from an article entitled Time Burden on Patients with Metastatic Breast and Ovarian Cancer from Clinic and Home Demands. This was published in JAMA Network Open online in December of 2025. I've thought a lot about the time burden of living with advanced cancer. You hear things like, oh, 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. So diving into this study. People have recruited from two sites, either through the University of Minnesota or the University of Alabama. And they completed baseline and follow-up surveys as well as used a mobile phone app to track their time use for 28 days. And the app uses both GPS and phone sensor data to figure out location as well as activity type. And there's more details on that, and you can, of course, look at the study if you want to know more. But I found it very interesting that they ended up with a total of 60 patients, half of whom had MBC, and over half were not working at this point. Most patients also were in treatment for what they called recurrent or progression in their disease. So we're not on their first-line therapy. There's a neat graph that if you want to look at, you can go to the link and look at the different time use types or ways that they're spending their time related to their cancer diagnosis, including things like travel time, waiting in the oncologist's office time, managing medical claims and bills, monitoring their health, scheduling appointments, looking up information about cancer, etc. So let's talk about the results, the fun part. The patients report on average four out-of-home cancer-related episodes, like visiting a clinic or a pharmacy, over the 28 days. So roughly we can think of that once a week. Patients had to go out of their home to do something that involved most frequently clinic visits and laboratory. So get getting your labs done. Almost half of them reported wait times less than 15 minutes, but 14% reported wait times of over 60 minutes. And I can think of that sometimes when I visited my oncologist in the past, right? Like super long wait times. You just you know you're gonna be there all day. I actually a couple weeks ago had a wait time of two and a half hours to get my labs. The order for the labs had expired, and then the faxes didn't go through, and poof, you know, two and a half hours later, it finally happened for me. And that was that was a pretty brutal day, too. And so I think we all had those experiences. Thankfully, it's not most of the time, but it can happen. I love that they calculated the travel time for some of these visits. On average, it was about 35 minutes, the range was 20 to 57 minutes in terms of where most of them fell. Obviously, there's more people with more or less time than that. And so they actually came out with this statement, concluding that the time spent waiting and traveling for care often exceeded the amount of time receiving care. Most days, the participants in the study had a home cancer-related task to do, 80% of days, and the median, they say, was about 209 minutes per week doing cancer-related tasks at home. So that means taking medications, scheduling, medical bills, symptoms, planning related to cancer appointments. So it's not too surprising that over one-third of the participants said that these cancer-related tasks disrupted their daily activity on more than half their days. This study shows that for most of the people in this study, the time per week that they spend dealing with their healthcare, travel, home-related tasks is not technically a full-time job, right? We're not talking about 35 to 40 hour weeks. For most people, there were two people in this study that were above 25 hours per week, but the majority were really in the five to 15 hours per week. And that's not insignificant when we think about how many hours we're spending a week related to our cancer-related care to keep ourselves alive. I've been on several lines of treatment now, and I think there were definitely some easier lines when I was on oral medications with minimal side effects that life felt kind of normal compared to perhaps some of the other treatment lines, um, you know, where it's maybe a day one, day eight of the 21-day cycle with IV infusions, and I'm traveling to get to those chemo sessions. So, yeah, I'm curious when you reflect on where you are in your journey. Does this resonate with you? I'm glad that people are actually documenting and trying to study this so that we can truly understand what it's like to be living with something like metastatic breast or metastatic ovarian cancer in this case. And hopefully we can figure out ways to alleviate some of these burdens. And so that ends today's segment on Should We Deal with Shorts. I'm pretty nerdy, so once again, feel free to send me any ideas or topics that you might have, and I'll try to dig into some literature or research about them so that we can reflect on all the things that we're now stuck dealing with. I hope that you're doing well. Take care. Until next time.