Cancer Showed Me What Strength Really Means

At any given moment, Katie Rabinowitz is living three or four lives. She’s a friend, sister, and daughter; a dog parent; a marathon runner — and she has stage 4 breast cancer. But while her diagnosis often plays a central role in her life, it doesn’t define her.

“I think so many people have cancer or have an underlying health issue, and that becomes what people see about them,” Rabinowitz tells SheKnows. “But cancer is just one part of my life… It doesn’t dictate everything, and I kind of refuse to let it dictate everything.”

In this video, Rabinowitz shares her experiences living with breast cancer and how her diagnoses — from first learning she had stage 0 breast cancer in 2021 to her subsequent diagnosis of stage 4 cancer in 2023 — changed her relationship to movement and strength. “I used to think of strength as powering through,” Rabinowitz says. “Strength to me now means advocating for yourself. It means showing up for your friends and family. It also means knowing when you have to say no to something,” she says. “It means knowing your own body well enough to know what it can do.” 

Case in point: When Rabinowitz signed up to run the Philadelphia Marathon this past November, she hoped to cross the finish line, of course. But her top goal was getting to the starting line. “Showing up … that’s strength in and of itself. And if I can’t do this and I realize that halfway through, admitting that is also strong.”

Hear Rabinowitz’s full, inspiring story in the video above.

Content was independently created by SHE Media with funding from Novartis Pharmaceuticals.

For US audiences only.