I read this article and it hit so close to home. I'm praying for Jeanine that she make it through this lung cancer. My mother was a smoker and a lung cancer survivor, thank God. I remember my mom having a persistent cold and cough that wouldn't go away and after arguing that it's just a "smoker's cough", she finally went to the doctor and found out it was lung cancer stage 2. Thankfully they caught it early and with surgery and aggressive chemotherapy, my mom survived lung cancer and in September, will be celebrating 8 years cancer free. When I read the article below on Everyday Health, it was a sobering reminder of how fragile life can be and that lung cancer can happen to anyone, it doesn't discriminate. This poor girl never even smoked and she has stage IV lung cancer. What a nightmare.
Jeanine Pucci was surprised to learn her persistent cough was something more serious.
Jeanine Rivas
Jeanine had never smoked a day in her life
For teachers, colds are just part of the job. So when Jeanine Pucci, 43, developed a cough in the early fall of 2013, she assumed she caught something from one of her first graders.
“But the cough didn’t seem to be going away,” Pucci remembers.
After about two months of persistent coughing and urging from her friends, she finally went to a walk-in clinic where a chest X-ray revealed a mass on her lungs. A doctor at Memorial Sloan Kettering later told her she had stage IV lung cancer that had spread to her bone. The news, delivered just days before Thanksgiving, came as a shock in part because the cancer was so advanced, but also because Pucci was not a smoker.
“I was repulsed by [smoking] my whole life. I could not even look at an ashtray. I never even tried a cigarette,” she says.