wanted to have a low-dose CT scan. This time, her doctor agreed.
Not wanting to rush and have the scan before her vacation, Denise made her appointment for two days after her return.
On the day of her scan, Denise was pleased to find out how simple it really was. She was able to keep her clothes on while laying on a bed that went through what she calls, “a donut,” a few times. It was an easy process that took only 10 minutes.
The following day, Denise received her results and a fear she’d had for some time now became reality. There was a mass on her lungs that the doctors diagnosed to be cancer. From there, Denise went into autopilot following the orders of her doctors. She had several more tests done to decipher staging and see if her body was healthy enough to undergo surgery. In addition to the testing, Denise got a second opinion from another doctor to verify everything she’d found out thus far was accurate. In confirming what she’d been told, the second doctor couldn’t help but be stunned by her story, repeatedly asking her, “how did you catch this so soon?”
The next few months were tough for Denise, but not as tough as the day she flew to Arizona to tell her mother what was going on. “The hardest part was telling my mom because my dad died from cancer and that was very painful for all of us. I’m not a parent, but I can imagine the hardest thing for a parent to hear from their child is that I have cancer,” Denise recalls. “I didn’t want my mom to worry about me, but the good part about it was that I was able to say to her, they found a lump in my upper left lung, but because I had this scan, they