In 2014, Liz Ingram was told she had just 18 months to live.
Yet she's still here almost 12 years later, making art and going to yoga and laughing with friends as often as she can.
It's been a rollercoaster ride of surgeries and treatments that started with a diagnosis of Stage 4 lung cancer, which then metastasized to her brain.
"It was totally scary," Ingram remembers of the diagnosis. "It was a complete shock. The first thing I said to my husband was goodbye."
Since then, Ingram has joined a new breed of cancer "survivors" - people who take targeted oral treatments that don't provide a cure but can drastically slow or even stop tumour growth.
"This is a whole new concept - that cancer is not the death sentence that it was," explains Edith Pituskin, professor in the Faculty of Nursing and adjunct with the Department of Oncology, who describes cancer as a new chronic disease.
"People are living with advanced cancer for not just weeks or months but years, and they are living full lives," Pituskin says. "It's a new patient population that we really don't know much about."
That's why she launched LONGEVITI, a qualitative study of people living with advanced cancer that includes an art exhibit at the Stanley A. Milner (Downtown) Library until the end of May.
