“Catching this cancer early and being treated by professionals who specialize in cancer — like the doctors at Fox Chase — saved my life and my lungs.”‐Donna Thompson
I was first diagnosed with lung cancer in 2015. The year before, I’d been diagnosed with diabetes, and I was trying to manage it through diet and lifestyle. In September 2015, I ate something that spiked my blood sugar, and I developed such terrible chest pain that I drove to the emergency department at a hospital near where I live in Yeadon, Pennsylvania.
They took a chest X-ray, brought my blood sugar down, and sent me home. The very next day, a doctor called to tell me the X-ray had revealed a mass in my lung. After five weeks of testing and imaging, my new pulmonologist called to tell me that I had non-small cell adenocarcinoma — lung cancer.
Top-Tier Surgical Referral
The pulmonologist referred me to Dr. Stacey Su, Chief of Thoracic Surgery at Fox Chase Cancer Center, who is considered to be tops in the area. She was very empathetic and reassuring, and I felt confident about her performing my surgery.
In November, Dr. Su removed the upper right lobe of my lung. The margins came back clear, which meant she got all the cancer, but my tumor turned out to be a rare type that could travel through air spaces as opposed to blood vessels or lymph nodes, which is how cancer normally spreads. As a result, she sent me to see Dr. Hossein Borghaei, a medical oncologist specializing in lung cancer at Fox Chase, for a second opinion about follow-up treatment.
I’ll never forget the first time I met Dr. Borghaei. When I told him my story, he said that if this were his family member, he’d tell them to choose chemotherapy. However, this was my choice, he added, and if I decided against chemo, I’d need to get scanned every two to four months. Instead of issuing orders, he made me feel like we were on a team together. He made me feel like I still had agency.
A Second Cancer Diagnosis
I ultimately opted for chemotherapy at my local hospital, but I got too sick after just two treatments, so I wound up getting scanned every few months after all. From 2016 to 2021, I was fastidious about going for my scheduled scans. After five years of what appeared to be clean scans, I was given the OK by my local oncologist to move to annual scans. This meant I didn’t get another scan until January 2022, and suddenly there was a new tumor, the same size as my original tumor, on my lower right lung. I couldn’t believe it. How could it have grown so fast in just 11 months?
The doctors I was seeing rushed me toward surgery, and I let them because I wanted this tumor out. I considered getting a second opinion from Dr. Su and even made the appointment, but I’d started a new job and decided I didn’t have the time. Then, a few days before my scheduled surgery with another provider, Dr. Su called me.
She told me that I hadn’t had someone consistently looking out for me and that I didn’t have enough information, as the tissue from the latest biopsy was inconclusive. She asked if she could refer me to an interventional pulmonologist at Fox Chase who would attempt to get enough tissue to confirm it was a tumor. She also said that the decision about surgery was mine to make, but she asked me to let her see the scans and reports so she could give me her take on everything. “Once they take this portion of lung out, they can’t put it back,” she said. I respected her so much that I agreed.
As it turned out, the tumor had been growing in my right lung since 2018, and the radiologist that handled the report at the first hospital I went to had missed it. What’s worse, it became clear that the oncologist never actually looked at the photos from the scan. That was the final straw. I was going back to Fox Chase.
Returning to Fox Chase
Dr. Su performed a second surgery to remove another portion of my right lung. Afterward, I chose to see Dr. Borghaei again for my oncology treatment. We’d only had that one consultation in 2015, but he’d made an impression — and all these years later, he remembered me! Thanks to biomarker testing, we found a drug that would treat my specific type of lung cancer.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t tolerate it, so now we’re monitoring again with regular scans. This time, I know I’m in good hands.
The truth is, I didn’t want to go back to Fox Chase. It was farther away from where I lived than the hospital around the corner. But I couldn’t afford not to go there. My life depended on it.
Today, I do a lot of lung cancer awareness advocacy work with organizations like The White Ribbon Project and the American Lung Cancer Association. More and more young women are getting lung cancer, and there are other populations at risk, like firefighters, who should be screened regularly. Catching this cancer early and being treated by professionals who specialize in cancer — like the doctors at Fox Chase — saved my life and my lungs. I want others to have the same chance.
Learn more about treatment for lung cancer at Fox Chase Cancer Center.