Stage IV. Triple-positive. Metastatic. Still here.
I’m Amy Rushing, an Atlanta, Georgia-based production professional, storyteller and Stage IV triple-positive metastatic breast cancer survivor. I was diagnosed with breast cancer in November 2017 and found to have metastatic disease in 2018. Nearly nine years after that original diagnosis, I’m still here. Remission was documented by PET scan in 2020, more than six years ago.
That is not the whole story. But it is one of the facts that gives this project its stakes.
Before cancer, there was already a survival file.
I spent decades working behind the scenes in television and production, where the job is to take something chaotic and make it executable. Long before the diagnosis, that skill was already being tested by unemployment, a company collapse, self-employment, a mortgage, a failing production building and the daily work of turning wreckage into something usable.
So cancer did not introduce me to survival. It changed the rules again.
The middle-class gap
There is a group of people who can look perfectly stable on paper and still be one diagnosis, layoff, repair, insurance fight or bureaucratic denial away from crisis. They may have careers, mortgages, cars, businesses, degrees and years of doing what responsible adults were told to do. Then life stops fitting the form.
That messy middle is where The Unqualified Files lives.
Why The Unqualified Files exists
This is where I document what happened, what worked, what failed spectacularly, what the paperwork actually said and what I learned while trying to keep a life moving through systems that often have no useful box for it.
Work. Health. Money. Housing. Insurance. Identity. Belief. Bureaucracy. Community. Humor. The whole file.
What I do with the mess
Tell the story. Find the pattern. Keep the paperwork. Share the workaround. Admit what I do not know. Laugh where possible. And when the system produces something truly spectacular, preserve the evidence.
What this is not
This is not expert theater, miracle-cure territory or motivational wallpaper. It is lived experience, useful information, documented contradictions, honest uncertainty and the occasional absurdity too good not to file.
Still here. Still fighting. Still finding humor in the absurdity of it all.
Amy Rushing writes and hosts The Unqualified Files from Atlanta, Georgia.