By Leah Phillips, as told to Janie McQueen
I was diagnosed with lung cancer in December 2019. I never even tried a cigarette. I didn’t grow up around secondhand smoke. But at first, before I had biomarker testing, doctors told me they hoped I’d be alive at Christmas the following year.
In September 2019, it started with a cough that was persistent and didn’t go away. Eventually I was misdiagnosed with pneumonia. Then I went in for another CT scan and it showed lytic lesions — cancer spots — in my spine. A bone biopsy showed they’d spread from my lung to my spine…
