Two months.
That’s all it took for the cancer to completely invade the patient’s left lung after the initial diagnosis, when the image still looked like this:
Not long before the last image was taken, the patient had decided to visit a GP, due to almost trivial symptoms that wouldn’t go away. The persistency of the symptoms finally persuaded the patient to contact a medical doctor, but by then it was too late.
It’s one of the many traps lung cancer sets to misguide its host: staying below the radar for as long as it takes — often years — and only surface through symptoms that could point towards many everyday diseases without ever disconcerting the host. Only when the symptoms become overly persistent, alarm bells faintly ring.
To add insult to injury, many people mistake these symptoms for more “typical” long-term effects of smoking (if they smoke to begin with). Every long-term smoker has a bad cough, a ruined voice and your average breathing problems, right ?
Those are the main and mean problems:
- early symptoms are generic and non-specific;
- when the symptoms finally become persistent, the cancer had received enough elbow room to spread — example given, in more than 70% of small-cell carcinoma diagnoses, the cancer has metastasized to far-away organs such as liver, bone and brain.
And don’t be mistaken: even if you have smoked tobacco cigarettes in a former life for, say, ten or fifteen years, lung cancer (and several other cancers, for that matter) can catch up with you decades later. It takes its time, but is ruthless when it surfaces. (The same can be said about long-time tanning, or getting sunburned — even only once or twice as a child.)
My aunt Erin was bothered by a persistent cough in December 2024. She had smoked in her twenties and early thirties, but the cough came in her mid-seventies. By mid January she was diagnosed with last stage lung cancer (spread to the bones). By the end of January she was gone.
This is what lung cancer does in the end —
It hides and sneaks.
SOURCES: images are courtesy of Cafer Zorkun, MD (through WikiDoc, and copylefted).
Footnotes
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