*April 2025* by Karen LaBonté
Valerie Brown’s life with lung cancer began in 2012, with a cough. By November, she’d been back and forth to her primary care physician for antibiotics, even steroid injections, only to have no relief. Finally, she was referred to a pulmonologist. A CT scan showed ground glass opacity. Although lung cancer was a possibility, the doctor reassured her: “You’re too young. Mostly older people get it.”
The next step was a bronchoscopy, followed by a visit to a pulmonary interventionist, who immediately sent Valerie for a PET scan. “I got this nonchalant call on a Saturday morning before Christmas,” Valerie said. “They said, ‘We need to schedule you to see a surgeon. You have lung cancer.’”
There aren’t a lot of doctors in southern New Jersey, where Valerie lives, so she traveled to Philadelphia for a needle biopsy. “There was no talk about biomarker testing,” she said, but the report was definitive: adenocarcinoma of her left lung. “I had an open thoracotomy for an upper left lobectomy,” Valerie said. “I was told it was curative. There was no staging, no follow-up except for a CT scan every six months. That was it.” By today’s standards, that treatment seems almost primitive– but Valerie stayed recurrence-free for almost five years.
Everything changed during a family outing when Valerie tripped over a car seat and tumbled pell-mell down a hill. “It’s a family joke now,” said Valerie. “But it wasn’t so funny then.” A scan for her injured shoulder also picked up something unstable in her left lung. She returned to Pennsylvania for another needle biopsy and PET scan. This time, the tumor board — with Valerie included in the discussion — recommended proton radiation. Read more.
