A terrible pain in Susan Lee’s shoulder forced her into an orthopedic doctor’s office in 2014.
The mother of three was an avid exerciser. So, she figured it wasn’t anything more than a rotator cuff tear, which can be treated with medicine, physical therapy or minor surgery. The physician took photos of her shoulder through an MRI, and Lee went on her way.
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When she returned to pick up her MRI results from the radiologist, Lee couldn’t believe what she read.
“It said something about an incidental finding of a solitary pulmonary nodule,” Lee remembered. She was 53 at the time. “I’m sitting on the side of the road and I’m [thinking], ‘what is that?’ I get my phone out and I’m looking it up online.”
It was stage 1A lung cancer. Lee lost her mother to a decade-long lung cancer battle in December 2009.
“Needless to say, I put my phone down and got back on the road and kind of went into a state of shock because I lost my mother to this and it couldn’t be happening to me,” Lee recalled her car ride to her home in Maryland. “I just kept thinking this [couldn’t] be happening to me.”
According to the Cancer Treatment Centers of America, stage 1A non-small cell lung cancer means the cancer has not yet spread to the lymph nodes or other organs. The cancerous tumor is no more than 3 cm in width.
Lee met with an oncologist to learn more about what was happening with her body. She wanted to advocate for her body and, in order to do so, she had to understand how cancer worked.
She thought of her mother, a longtime smoker. A routine physical revealed her lung cancer at age 63.
Lee’s mother underwent surgery to take out the cancerous tumor, but her family didn’t know what questions to ask. Years later, a quarter-size tumor formed in her brain – migrating directly from her lungs.
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“She didn’t have chemo[therapy] from the lung surgery, but she ended up having radiation from the tumor in the brain,” Lee said. “My mother had a head full of gorgeous hair that she lost. Her scalp turned completely black. Her hair never grew back.”
After a series of strokes and developing dementia, her mother passed away. Though cancer free, it was the complications from the radiation that took her life.
Lee said if her family knew how cancer spreads throughout the body, they would’ve asked the doctor to take a scan of her mother’s brain.
She took that experience and applied it to her fight with lung cancer.“We sat with the thoracic surgeon. She went through the symptoms,” Lee said. She told the surgeon that she smoked cigarettes for about a year when she was 19 in an attempt to appear cool in college.
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“[The surgeon’s] like, listen. That was so many years ago. The probability that it came from that is slim,” Lee said, remembering the surgeon’s words. “So, she just said, we can look at it, we can watch it for the next three months or we can take it out.”
Lee and her husband decided that the tumor needed to come out.
During surgery, the surgeon did locate the tumor – and it was cancerous. The lower lobe of Lee’s right lung was removed.
“I went home and the recovery was eight weeks,” Lee said. “I got up week one and I walked and I started walking every day. I had a chest tube in and it was draining fluid out of my lungs, but I knew I had to get up because what I’ve seen from anyone who has experienced cancer [is] the ones who survive are the ones who get up.”
Also, Lee wanted to show her children that no matter what you’re going through, it’s important to go through it with strength and courage.
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“After eight weeks, I started cooking again. I went back to work,” Lee said. “I went back to my vice president of sales job, a fully stressed out job, but I approached it from a different perspective.”
Now cancer-free, Lee is an advocate for lung cancer through Lung Force, an organization for women to stand together in the fight against lung cancer.
“You’ve got to connect yourself with people that want the same journey you want,” Lee said. “That keeps me going. When I wake up everyday, and as I come to work, I think about the heroes that are out there that are in a worst situation than me that are empowered to learn more, to speak up, to do more and to be more.”