Lori B. calls herself a “healthy-looking” woman, but she wants people to know that looks can be deceiving.
“Everyone says ‘you look so great,’” she said. “But you can’t judge a book by its cover.”
Lori lives in Park Hills, MO, a small town where everyone knows everyone. A 57-year-old retired small business owner, she suffered for 9 months with what she thought was a pulled muscle in her left hip and lower back. She went to her primary care physician and had six rounds of physical therapy as well as x-rays looking at her sacroiliac joint (the connection between her spine and pelvis), only to be told to continue with her physical therapy regimen and take glucosamine for arthritis.
After seeking another opinion and getting a CT scan, doctors found a tumor in her lung and bone metastasis. On May 10, 2023, she was diagnosed with stage 4B (IVB) lung cancer.
She is frustrated because doctors need to be aware they cannot judge people by their looks alone. Her frustration grows even more because she knows that if she had a smoking history, she would have qualified for a screening, which would have detected her lung cancer at an earlier stage.
“I never smoked, tried to eat healthy, exercised, and did all of the standard well-woman preventative screenings, such as mammograms and colonoscopies, my doctor recommended,” Lori said. “All when a simple CT scan would have caught this early and given me more treatment options.”
She is currently on targeted therapy and participating in a clinical trial on her doctor’s advice – and she is stable.
“Someone did a clinical trial on the targeted therapy that is successful for me, and so participating in a clinical trial is my way of giving back,” Lori said.
Contact our LungMATCH team at 1-800-298-2436 or support@go2.org to learn more about clinical trials that may be right for you.
I walked into my doctors office coughing up blood, with shortness of breath, unexplained weight loss, and a tight chest. I was a 30 pack year smoker. She listened to my lungs and diagnosed anxiety. I showed her photos of the fresh bright red blood soaked tissues from my worst night that week. Anxiety again. My problem was I was only 46, that was why I didn’t have lung cancer. You have to be fifty.
Testing is absolute crap. The qualifications for it suck, as well as the scan itself having an extremely high fail rate. Dont ever think the problem lies with anything other than a system that’s full of booby traps that are designed to get people to fail.
Even now, 5 years later with no cancer in my body, I’m still considered incurable and terminal. So I left oncology, because ain’t nobody got time for that.