Both your cancer and its treatments can cause symptoms and side effects. Whether you have pain, headaches, mood changes, or other symptoms, palliative care providers can help you manage them and have a better quality of life.

“As the patient, it's important that you feel in charge in the driver's seat of your health journey. … It may be difficult to ask your doctor specific questions about your palliative care, but it's important to bring up any concerns as well as goals that you have, and to be prepared to get hard answers to those hard questions.”

It's important to understand that palliative care is different from hospice. Palliative care happens alongside your metastatic breast cancer treatment. It's meant to relieve the physical and emotional symptoms of your cancer. Palliative care is about improving quality of life in people with a serious illness. Ask to be connected with palliative care right from the start of your treatment. These are some ways to get ready for your appointment to discuss palliative care.

Having a sense of what types of palliative care you need (pain relief, etc.) can help your oncologist (cancer doctor) match you to the right specialists. Go into the appointment with a list of questions to ask your doctor, and be ready for the questions they might ask you.

It's important that your mBC care team and the palliative care team are working together. And it's vital that you feel like part of a team. Your doctor shouldn't just tell you want to do, but also consider your input and take the symptoms you report seriously.

You may walk out of the office with a referral from your oncologist to a palliative care specialist. Or your doctor's office may connect you with a nurse navigator or social worker who can help you get in touch with palliative care. It's important to understand what treatments you're going to be receiving and what the goals are.

Know who on the palliative care team is going to be treating you.

It's good to ask why they feel that treatment is the best option for you, and if there are other options you could try.

Learn about the costs.

Have you asked how much your treatment will cost, and how much your insurance will cover?

Find out about how the treatment works.

It helps to talk to other people with metastatic breast cancer who've had experience with the treatment and see if it helped them or not

Understand how your care providers will communicate with each other. 

My doctors are in the same electronic health network, so they can all see my scan results and communicate with each other. It's important that they do communicate, because if you're seeing someone for complementary therapies, you've got to make sure nothing they're giving you will interfere with your cancer treatment.