YouTube star Grace Helbig opened up about her ongoing stage IV breast cancer battle.
“It has been a month since my brain surgery to remove two tumors from my brain,” Helbig, 41, said in a Friday, November 13, video shared via TikTok. “Healing has been going great.”
Helbig was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2023, subsequently undergoing a lumpectomy. While Helbig went into remission after her treatment, she revealed in October that the tumors had metastasized and spread to her brain. She underwent brain surgery later that month.
“If this was 20 years ago, I think this would be very scary but science and medicine has advanced in so many ways,” Helbig acknowledged of her prognosis. “Now, stage IV is often treated like a chronic illness. Wild, but let me be clear, I am stage IV metastatic breast cancer, however, I am NED, which stands for no evidence of disease.”
Despite being declared cancer-free, Helbig has faced “lingering anxiety” over the possibility that her cancer will return.
“Every time I get a mammogram, every time I’ve gone for an MRI, [I worried] that there would be [a] recurrence,” she admitted. “The positive side, I’ve been through this before and I’ve had this ghost of breast cancer past, sort of, following me around to my medical appointments. I wasn’t totally thrown off guard by the fact that it had recurred.”
Helbig has since found community with fellow breast cancer survivors, praising how the patients continue to have “fulfilling lives” amid their own stage IV diagnoses.
“I now get to enter their elite group of metastatic badasses,” she stated. “Seeing them the last few years has really primed me to understand that it is paradoxically possible to live beautiful, relatively normal … lives with stage IV metastatic breast cancer. Things have lined up in very interesting ways the last few years, which has made all of this, right now, a lot more palatable than I think it could have been. I’m very grateful for that.”
Helbig completed her fifth round of radiation treatment earlier this month and said she still feels “very optimistic” about her next steps.
“Now is the part of my treatment plan where I am trying to figure out what will be my treatment moving forward,” she noted. “I think this [journey] has been teaching me how to say yes to very uncertain moments that you couldn’t really plan for. It’s definitely made me much more malleable, much more flexible and, through that process, I think more resilient.”
