Detecting Lung Cancer Blog

Long before Kristy met him, her husband Justin started smoking. He was just 14 years old at the time. He would continue smoking until he was 28 and then quit, cold turkey. He died of lung cancer when he was 30. He was the sixth person over four generations of his family to die from lung cancer.

Of course, there is much more to Justin’s life than the circumstances of his death. Kristy tells it all in her attempt to convince young people – all people – not to take up the number-one risk factor for lung cancer: smoking.

Justin had been a star in high school, beating out a senior for the quarterback position on the varsity football team when he was just 16. Smart, good looking, athletic and kind, he was popular and admired. When he graduated high school at 18, he did so as an All American Scholar. He was also smoking a pack or two of cigarettes a day.

It all started with a simple cholesterol check. The doctor said that Jan’s cholesterol was high, so he wanted her to have a CT scan to check her heart. She’d had a CT scan a few years earlier, and the doctor compared the latest scan with the earlier one. Something was different. He recommended a PET scan.

Jan was diagnosed with Stage 2b Adenocarcinoma – lung cancer.

She was not a smoker – the leading risk factor for lung cancer. She had no family history of lung cancer or exposure to carcinogens. In fact, she had virtually none of the risk factors for lung cancer.

Yet there it was.

When Nancy sees young people smoking, she thinks, “What are you doing?”

She tells them, “I lost my daughter at 36, but they think they’re indestructible.” She asks them, “What are you going to do if you find out you have it?” She wonders if it’s because they think they can’t get lung cancer.

Mostly, though, she thinks about the daughter she lost – Heather – the daughter who once told her, “Mom, when I turn 35, I’m going to quit. I’m going to try to quit.”

Heather was just a year older than that when she was diagnosed with small cell lung cancer in November 2008. She died in March 2009, just a month before her 37^th birthday.

Leslie’s story starts with two men named Mike, who were best friends and golf buddies. The first Mike was Leslie’s husband. He died of lung cancer in 2009, unable to fulfill his dream of playing golf with his buddy at the famous St. Andrew’s course in Scotland. The other Mike is a man who lost his legs in Vietnam and who carried his friend’s ashes to St. Andrew’s on his way to becoming the first person in a wheelchair to play the course.

Lung cancer has taken its toll on Barbara – she lost her first husband Erwin and her younger sister Laurie to the disease. Coincidentally, they both died on Memorial Day weekend, 18 years apart. He was 56, and she was 55.

There were other parallels between Barbara’s sister and her first husband. Both were initially diagnosed with pneumonia and treated for that illness. Erwin had had a persistent cough, which the doctors attributed to bronchitis. Laurie failed to respond to treatment and grew sicker and sicker. In both cases, x-rays revealed the cancer.

What struck Barbara most profoundly about the cancer treatment her sister and husband received was how little it changed in nearly two decades.

A certain sense of dread has surrounded the Ides of March since William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar found its way to the stage. For Dina, the 15^th day of the third month lived up to its dark reputation in 2001. It was her mother’s 50^th birthday, and the day her mother called Dina to tell her she had Stage 3B Adenocarcinoma – lung cancer.

“I sat in a chair in my living room and listened to my mom give me this news over the phone, and I clenched my teeth so hard that I locked my jaw,” Dina says. “I threw the phone at my husband because I couldn’t listen anymore and ran next door to my sister-in-law’s. It was just like the world was falling apart.”

Mia’s mother had been having chest pain and a funny cough for a few days. Mia and the rest of the family did not think much about it, and Mia’s mom did not complain.

Then the cough and chest pain got worse, and they took their Mom to the emergency room. She ended up staying in the hospital for a week, undergoing tests. At first, the doctors thought she had a blood clot in her lung, but after more tests and interpretations, the diagnosis was Stage 3 non-small cell carcinoma – lung cancer.

Lung cancer was unknown in Mia’s family, although a lot of people in the family were smokers, some up to two packs a day, and lung cancer is the number-one risk factor for the disease.

Her mom had smoked about a pack a day since she was 16 years old. She was 59 when the diagnosis came. According to our Lung Cancer Risk Assessment, which is based upon a published risk model by M.D. Anderson researchers and clinicians, this made her approximately 17 times more likely to develop lung cancer than someone her age who has never smoked.

According to Mia, there were no lung cancer symptoms before the chest pain and cough, either.

To hear Ed tell it, he and his wife Teri had always had a special kind of relationship. He is a truck driver. She was an accountant. He is perceived to be a tough biker dude. She loved golf and spending time with her kids and grandkids, ending conversations with the phrase “Be good to you.” But above all, they were completely devoted to each other.

Ed and Teri wanted that special relationship to go on as long as possible, so they quit smoking in 2005. They decided to remove the number-one risk factor for lung cancer and a major contributor to heart disease from their lives.

After they quit, Teri complained that she felt as though she had something she needed to cough up. She asked Ed if he felt the same way. He said he did not.

For Nancy, the situation was uncanny. In 2004, she lost her daughter to lung cancer after a six-month battle against the disease. Nancy was so depressed by her daughter’s death that she was virtually bedridden for year, rising only to go to church on Sunday. She said that her faith help her through this rough time.

Then, as if fate were actively searching for a way to be more cruel, Nancy was diagnosed with the same cancer that killed her daughter. But there was an important difference—her daughter’s tumor was inoperable because it was too close to her heart. Nancy’s, however, was operable.

More than 20 years ago, a doctor told Johnie Beth she would be dead in six months. She is now 74 years old.  

Her husband at the time was with her when the doctor made his prognosis. He was adamant that she would not die.

“I looked at my husband,” Johnie Beth remembers. “Then I looked at my doctor and said, ‘I’m buying his (my husband's) story. I’m not going to die.’”

Lung cancer was not enough to stop on man from living his life. A week before Cindy’s father died of small cell lung cancer, he had his driver’s license renewed.

“He just didn’t want to stop,” says Cindy, who has also lost her mother-in-law to small cell lung cancer. “He was taking showers and taking care of himself up until a few days before he passed.”

Her dad had everything to live for, Cindy says, and she believes it was his love of life that kept him alive far beyond his doctors’ expectations. Initially given six months, he lived more than three years, which was long enough to see the births of more grandchildren.

Cindy’s mother-in-law died within a year of her diagnosis, in July 1995. She was just a couple of months shy of retirement when she was diagnosed and “looking forward to enjoying life,” Cindy says.

Tammy did not think the pain in her back was anything more than a pulled muscle. But instead of getting better, her pain got worse—eventually, to the point where it brought her to tears.

Her daughter wanted to take her to the hospital, but she refused as long as she could. Finally, her husband called his mother and had her take Tammy to the emergency room.

At the hospital, Tammy learned that she was not dealing with a pulled muscle; instead the doctors found a mass in her lung.

Tammy was told not to go to work the next day, but to see her family doctor instead. She did, and her doctor sent her immediately to a cancer specialist. There, she had her lung cancer diagnosis - She was diagnosed with Stage 4 non-small cell carcinoma.

The difference between the Sandra who, at 66, leads Zumba classes and stopped smoking and the Sandra who, just a few years ago, smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and weighed 290 pounds could not be more stark. The former Sandra had trouble breathing to the point that her doctor suggested she go on oxygen. She could barely walk. The Sandra of today bounces up flights of stairs and feels great.

Ironically, feeling so good could have killed her.

Gary can remember the exact moment he quit smoking. His last cigarette came on March 1, 2009, at 9:45 p.m. He had smoked for 50 years.

The next morning, he had an angioplasty to check for blockage in his coronary arteries. Ten minutes into the angioplasty, which normally takes 30 to 90 minutes, the procedure was stopped. All four arteries were almost entirely blocked. The next day, he had quadruple bypass surgery. 

This was the beginning of a health-care odyssey that would involve not only Gary’s heart, but also his lungs. In April and May of that year, tests revealed spots on his lung. It was cancer – Adenocarcinoma. In June, he underwent surgery to remove a lobe of his right lung. Radiation treatments followed.

Gary had a total of four major surgeries over a span of two years. He was not expected to survive any of them.

Debbie’s 47^th year was the hardest of her life—It was then that she was diagnosed with Adenocarcinoma, a form of lung cancer.

Since then, things have gotten better. For the time being, her cancer has at least stopped growing. She no longer requires the chemotherapy and radiation treatments that made her so sick. Though this news is very positive, it is still hard.

“Will the cancer come back?” she asks herself every day.

Now 49, Debbie looks back and remembers the emotional and physical pain.

A two-time breast cancer and one-time spinal cancer survivor, Dawn from Georgia is not only a three-time cancer survivor, but also a three-time lung cancer caregiver. She was with her mother, her father and one of her sisters as they fought the disease and, in the end, passed away. She knows what it means to fight cancer.

By the time Dawn’s mother was diagnosed in December 2005, the cancer was already in Stage 4. She died less than a year later, in October 2006. Dawn’s father received his diagnosis of Stage 3 lung cancer in January 2008, opted for no radiation treatments or chemotherapy, and died a few days before his 71^st birthday in May of 2008. Her oldest sister was diagnosed with Stage 3 lung cancer in April 2010 and died in November 2010. She was only 49 years old.