TikToker, 29, with Incurable Stage 4 Cancer Shares Her ‘Living List’ for the Time She Has Left (Exclusive)
From solving a Rubik’s Cube to traveling to marrying her fiancé, Clare Sacco’s list is about “living life to the fullest”
Clare Sacco would really like to solve a Rubik’s Cube.
“It’s much harder than it looks,” the 29-year-old marketing and events manager tells PEOPLE.
The famously challenging puzzle is the first thing Sacco is tackling on her “living list” — her collection of must-do activities that she started compiling after being diagnosed with incurable stage 4 cancer this past March.
“The most common name is obviously ‘the bucket list,’ ” Sacco, who lives in Newcastle, England, tells PEOPLE. “[But] my list is about living life to the fullest, as opposed to completing things before I die. So that's why I called it a ‘living list,’ because it’s about living and living life to the fullest.”
Also at the top of her list: her February wedding to her fiancé Alex, whom she’s known since she was 11. He proposed in May — two months after she learned her cancer was incurable — and, she says, “he feels good about [the list]."
As for the rest of the list, “some of the things are so simple, I suppose. And some of them are more adventurous.”
On the simple end, along with the Rubik’s Cube? “Learn to juggle” and go stargazing, which she says is “planned for later on in the year.”
On the more adventurous side, Sacco has a lot of travel in mind, from snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef in Australia to driving Route 66 in the United States to visiting the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios in Orlando.
Clare Sacco/TikTok, Clare Sacco/Instagram
She’d also really like to get on a game show, like Deal or No Deal, which is returning to the U.K., and says, “I’ve put in some applications.”
“I wanted to look at it as a series of things that would make me happy, make amazing memories,” she tells PEOPLE, “as opposed to ticking things off that I felt like I should achieve in my life.”
Prognoses for stage 4 metastatic breast cancer vary, with the Cleveland Clinic pointing to a statistic that “1 in 3 women . . . were alive five years after diagnosis.”
However, “[Doctors] haven't given me a ballpark and I haven't asked for one, either,” Sacco says.
Sacco was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2019 after discovering a lump in her right breast.
“It's very likely that that lump had been there for quite a long time…[but because] I was so young,” Sacco, who was 25 at the time of her initial diagnosis, tells PEOPLE, “I'd never even researched how to check [for lumps].”
She underwent chemo and radiation, and says she was given the “all clear.”
But after experiencing breathlessness and fatigue, she says that this past March, she was given the sobering news that her cancer had returned. “I had multiple tumors in my lungs and in my liver,” she says.
When breast cancer metastasizes — or spreads elsewhere in the body — “there isn’t a cure,” the Cleveland Clinic says. Instead, treatment options are about “helping people live for as long as they can, with the best possible quality of life.”
And while Sacco tells PEOPLE, “I’m feeling okay,” she says, “There was no reason why I should have been diagnosed so young,” as she doesn’t have a family history of breast cancer, and says that genetic testing for the breast cancer gene was negative.
That need for early detection is why Sacco started her TikTok account, where she chronicles her diagnosis and treatment.
“I just wanted to make people aware that they still need to be checking their bodies, and it is still a possibility, even if they're only in their twenties.”
Cancer rates among young people are rising, according to a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which said that “breast cancer had the highest number of incident early-onset cases.”
For now, Sacco is focused on completing her living list — including a big item she'll check off after her wedding in February.
“I'm going on my honeymoon next year,” says Sacco, who has been with her fiancé, Alex, for three and a half years, and she says he has requested to do “all of the really fun things” on her living list with her.
Clare Sacco/Instagram
Clare Sacco and fiancé Alex.The couple, she says, plan to go “jetskiing in the Caribbean next year” on their honeymoon cruise.
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In the meantime, she is focused on spreading awareness about breast cancer in young people via her TikTok account.
“The most important thing is young people know that it might not be publicized, but you can get breast cancer,” she tells PEOPLE.
“There’s a possibility that if it had been caught sooner, I wouldn’t be in this position where it’s incurable.”
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