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Jackpot: How A Rare Form Of Lung Cancer Changed Everything For Me And My Family
Four years ago I coughed up blood.
I saw an ear, nose and throat specialist and an oncologist in Corpus Christi, Texas, who suggested that perhaps I avoid tortilla chips, as I’d probably just cut my trachea eating. No big deal. A year later I got knocked up in a flurry of Hurricane Harvey tragedy excitement, which was pretty great, until I developed a cough so violent I vomited constantly and could hardly eat, drink or gain weight.
The same ENT told me that there was nothing he could do ― after all, this was “what we sign up for when we become parents” and I’d probably be fine once I had the baby.
I wasn’t.
I never stopped coughing. All day, all night. Fast forward nine months and I developed a pneumonia I couldn’t shake while my son struggled with the knock-on effects of what turned out to be a misdiagnosed lung cancer. I must have missed the cancer sign-up sheet.
Last May, a plucky pulmonologist diagnosed me with neuroendocrine cancer of the lung ― a rare disease that he insisted was the jackpot of malignant lung cancers.
“It’s hardly cancer!” he told me. “It grows so slow, it’s Cancer Lite. Definitely the lung cancer you want to get. Definitely.”
Was it really? I wondered, squirming in my 1990s nausea-patterned chair. Wasn’t not getting cancer the jackpot you wanted to hit? No matter. The doctor went on.
“This is nothing. You cut out the lung. Bam, you’re back to your regular life.”
I couldn’t quite integrate this knowledge with the facts of my regular life: I had a 10-month-old son, a 5-year-old daughter. I was 36, a nonsmoker, an obnoxious consumer of organic green peppers who religiously held her breath when driving past the local oil refineries three miles from our home. “What are you doing, Mama?” my daughter had asked years ago with fear and disgust. “Saving the life of your unborn half-fish, half-fetus brother!” I gasped after we careened past Refinery Row.
But now, there it was, a tumor the size of a small...
