LUNG CANCER—COMING SOON TO A NON-SMOKER NEAR YOU

So what if lung cancer is the #1 cancer killer in the world? I won’t get it. I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life.

Neither had Dana Reeve, Christopher Reeve’s wife, who announced she had been diagnosed with lung cancer less than a year after his death and then died a mere seven months later.

But let’s not focus on Dana Reeve… a young mother who died in the prime of her life from a cancer that doesn’t seem “fair” given that she never smoked. That’s too sad. Too tragic.

Let’s put the focus back on the smokers. Yeah! Lung cancer is their problem, not ours!

UNLESS…

Did you or anyone you care about ever smoke in the past, but quit?

I’m not talking “quit” as in quit two weeks ago. I’m talking “quit” as in two years ago. Or five years ago. Or ten years ago. Or even forty years ago.

Oh, stop bothering me already! Lungs go back to normal ten years after quitting. Anyone who quit that long ago is no more likely to get lung cancer than a non-smoker! Right?

WRONG.

This is the lesson I learned the hard way…

…on February 20, 2007 when my beautiful, perfectly healthy 64-year-old mom was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer.

What? That’s impossible! She quit smoking 40 years ago.

But it’s not impossible. And this is the reality I’ve been struggling to come to terms with for the past 18 months as I battle side-by-side with my mom… to live.

Sixty-five percent of the people diagnosed with lung cancer today are never-smokers (like Dana Reeve) and former smokers (many who – like my beautiful mom – quit smoking decades ago).

Yes, 65%. The majority.

And this number – 65% – leads me to the most heart-breaking part of my story.

It sounds sick and twisted… but I find myself thinking: “Why couldn’t Mom have gotten breast cancer?!” Or “If only she’d gotten colon cancer!” Why do I say this? Because in traveling on this cancer journey with my mom – in trying to help her find hope in her treatment and prognosis, I’ve been confronted with a harsh reality:

The survival rates for lung cancer remain low because we as a society don’t care about lung cancer. And since we don’t care, we don’t fight for a cure.

We don’t fight for people like my mom, or people like Dana Reeve. Because lung cancer doesn’t elicit sympathy; it elicits blame. “They smoked; they refused to stop; they did it to themselves.” But what about the 65% of lung cancer patients who never smoked or who kicked the habit? We continue to ignore this majority. And I don’t understand why.

I don’t understand why, despite being the #1 cancer killer in the world, lung cancer is consistently left at the bottom of the list when it comes to cancer research funding.

Want to know what else I learned the hard way? Lung cancer kills more people every year than breast, colon, prostate, liver, kidney and melanoma cancers… combined. Most people don’t know this. I certainly didn’t… until lung cancer crashed into my life with my mom. Now I know that lung cancer kills 3 times as many men as prostate cancer and nearly twice as many women as breast cancer. Now I look at my beautiful mom and I feel betrayed. Why aren’t we aware of this? Why aren’t we doing something about it?

As I stand by Mom’s side through her ongoing chemo regimens, I have “cancer envy.” Wow, breast cancer’s 5-year survival rate (technically the “cure rate”) is 87%! And for prostate cancer, it’s 99%!

But Mom and I don’t get a shot at those odds, because lung cancer’s 5-year survival rate lags behind in the scientific “Dark Ages” at only 15%. And when I see that we spend 20 times more federal dollars on breast cancer research and 10 times more on prostate cancer than on lung cancer – I can’t help but conclude that Mom is paying the price. That she and my family are faced with these grim odds simply because we as a society don’t demand action – because we judge her cancer as less “virtuous.”