In my aunt Erin, it started with a small but persistent cough.
It was late December, the cough got worse and worse, and her voice started to deteriorate so briskly that by early January, she could hardly make a phone call anymore.
The ENT ordered a battery of tests — including medical imaging — and the diagnosis was unexpected: stage IV lung cancer, metastasized to the bones. The cough was only the messenger — the sentence was bleak.
My aunt had vigorously smoked since she was a teenager until she was about 40, but that was 40 years ago. And it still did the trick. People always tend to forget that in smoking, the damage that has been done is irreparable — the damage that counts, in any case. The cells that get harmed from the chemicals and go berserk do not stop proliferating when the host stops smoking. (It’s always better to quit in order to lower the chances, though.)
Emergency immunotherapy was scheduled, but the cancer was so aggressive that my aunt didn’t make it: by mid January she was swallowed by the shadows — just like that.
Unfortunately that’s how it often goes. Lung cancer — globally the most common type of cancer, diagnosed in more than 5% of the population and attributed to smoking in more than 85% of the patients — deeply hides in its host until the first apparently innocent symptoms show. While it has been there for years on end: growing, spreading, obstructing, intertwining, annihilating, then ultimately surfacing —
And finally ready to reap.
SOURCES: A case of the intrapulmonary spread of recurrent respiratory papillomatosis with malignant transformation, American Journal of Medical Sciences 350 (2015), 55–57. (Attribution: NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International)
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