Mother of three children, Melanie Erwin she believed that she was suffering from the symptoms of a long covid. Her doctors, however later diagnosed with potentially fatal lung cancer, despite never having touched a cigarette in her life. , despite the terrifying discovery, the woman tries to fight and improve her health.
She got lung cancer even though she never smoked
57-year-old Melanie from London began to complain of constant fatigue at the end of 2020. She assumed that it was a symptom of a severe variant of covid, so she visited her doctor, who sent them for an X-ray examination. However, the scan revealed something much more dangerous. It showed that there was a strange mass in her left lung, which doctors identified as non-small cell lung cancer.
The diagnosis surprised the Englishwoman enormously, because she claimed that she had never smoked a cigarette. But the truth is that there is a fairly large group of patients who will still get lung cancer. Experts point out that around a quarter of people diagnosed with this disease each year are non-smokers. “Many are very surprised when I tell them what type of cancer I have,” Melanie said, adding that she underwent chemotherapy, radiotherapy and even surgery to remove the tumor.
Doctors can no longer cure her
But it didn’t take long for the disease to become a problem again. In April 2022 doctors discovered several small nodules in her right lung cavity during a routine examinationwhich they were too small to be biopsied to see if it was cancer. It wasn’t until March of this year that the formations grew so large that they could reveal the answer from them. In the end, it turned out to be the worst possible news. They found that her disease has progressed to the last (terminal) stage and is incurable.
Melanie doctors diagnosed a specific lung cancer mutation called EGFR-positive. Interestingly, it occurs more often in patients who have never smoked and also affects a larger number of people in Asian countries. The symptoms are similar to other types of lung cancer, including chest pain, weight loss, shortness of breath, fatigue, and cough.
Her disease is incurable.
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The 57-year-old woman noted that the second diagnosis shocked her. She assumed that it was a death sentence. But now he takes daily medications designed to suppress the growth of tumor cells. “There will come a time when they will stop working because my cancer will start to ignore them. But I hope that by then another drug will be available. My goal is to live with stage four lung cancer and eventually die with it but not of it“, she clarified, saying that in addition to treatment, he lives a healthy lifestyle and avoids sugar, meat and alcohol.
