"I Know How Important Every Extra Month Is"

When Kathryn Hulland was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in 2022, she was told something no parent should ever have to hear: she'd be lucky to see 12 months.

That was three years ago. Her daughter, Grace, was six then. Grace is nine now.

"When I was first diagnosed, I was told I'd be lucky to see 12 months," Hulland said. "Three years later I know how important every extra month is."

This September, that fight took a real step forward. NICE — the UK body that decides which treatments the NHS will fund — approved Enhertu for NHS use in England, after rejecting it back in 2024 over cost. Enhertu is the first targeted, licensed treatment for HER2-low metastatic breast cancer, and in clinical trials it extended survival to roughly two years, compared with 17.5 months on standard chemotherapy. For around 1,000 women in England living with this specific form of advanced breast cancer, that gap between 17.5 months and two years isn't a statistic. It's more birthdays. More ordinary Tuesdays. More of exactly what Hulland has been counting since the day she got her diagnosis.

It took two years of campaigning — by patients, by charities like Breast Cancer Now, by people telling their own version of Hulland's story again and again until someone with the power to change the decision finally did — to get from "rejected" to "approved." Two years measured out one appeal, one meeting, one piece of evidence at a time, for a drug that measures its own success in months and minutes.

What strikes you about Hulland's quote isn't the fear in it. It's the arithmetic. She isn't talking about being cured. She's talking about months — extra ones, specific ones, the ones that let her keep being Grace's mother a little longer. A month, broken down, is roughly 43,200 minutes. Somewhere in whatever time Enhertu buys her is the actual minute she gets to walk Grace through the door on her first day of high school. Nobody can promise that minute exists yet. But three years ago, nobody could have promised any of the minutes that already happened, either — and they did.

This is precisely the kind of stakes Own The Minute was built to sit next to, if not solve. We can't extend anyone's time. No certificate does what Enhertu does. But we understand, in a very direct and literal way, what it means when a person tells you they've started counting in months instead of years — that every single minute stops being background noise and starts being something you'd fight to keep. Hulland already knows the value of an extra month better than most of us ever will. Own The Minute exists for the rest of us: a way to actually mark the exact minute something mattered, before you find yourself needing to count them the way she does.

For $3, you can permanently claim the real clock-time minute of whatever matters to you — the ordinary Tuesday you didn't take for granted, the minute someone you love walked through a door. It's a small thing. Kathryn Hulland's story is a reminder of why it isn't.

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