Coping with Cancer / Social Work
Among the many problems with lung cancer that everyone in the lung cancer community experiences is that the field does not receive the attention and the resources it deserves. And one of the leading reasons for this is the perception that there is less reason to support research to prevent or combat a disease that many people erroneously feel could be avoided by just not smoking. I think this form of “blame the victim” is a coping mechanism other people use to feel that they have control over an uncontrollable situation, that if they assign causation and blame for a life-threatening problem, it couldn’t happen to them. But the net result is that many people facing lung cancer not only have to deal with surgery, radiation, and/or chemo: they also need to deal with a stigma of lung cancer that doesn’t exist for victims of breast cancer or leukemia. These perceptions are widely observed but really not well described or studied, and it’s only with greater attention to the unfair treatment of patients with lung cancer that the lung cancer community can address this problem actively and try to remedy it. Toward that end, a graduate student in the School of Nursing at the University of Washington named Nancy Tennent, who previously worked in the research department of my own institution, has developed a survey to assess the patient’s experience of lung cancer, particularly focusing on issues like societal attitudes. She is hoping to get input from people here who are actual patients with lung cancer, and the information will be completely anonymous: the survey is done online and will not collect names or any information about the computer or internet location of the responders. This survey was approved after a thorough review by the Institutional Review Board at the University of Washington (trust me that this is a very protective and conservative group, as someone who has struggled to get research programs approved there), although the link to the survey notes that it is still under review (the wording needs to be updated).
For those of you who are interested in helping her with this project, which I hope she’ll present and publish in order to shine a light on the social challenges that compound the medical problems of living with lung cancer, you can find the link HERE.
Posted in: Social Work/Coping with CancerMy husband died of Stage IV Lung Cancer at the end of 2007. He had quit smoking in 1992. We both felt that he was in the clear after 15 years of being smoke free. That’s why it was such a surprise to both of us when he was diagnosed in Early August 2007 of Stage IV Lung Cancer. It had already spread to the liver and lymph nodes. I keep hearing that as soon as one stops smoking the body begins to heal itself. Well, it didn’t in my husband’s case. I quit smoking in 1993. I hope I don’t get lung cancer either although I am the healthiest I’ve ever been in my life. I never get sick.
Truth is, lung cancer also happens in non smoking people such as Dana Reeves.
You are so right, Dr. West, about the stigma attached to Lung Cancer and it isn’t right that it doesn’t receive the dollars to fight it like other cancers. I would like to know how many years ago that the cancer cells started growing in my husband. In those 15 years, he had been in the hospital numerous times due to stroke systems, shoulder surgery, and hand surgery. Is it possible that they could have seen something and didn’t mention anything?
Thanks, Dr. West, you do a marvelous job! I don’t know how you do it.
cdejac
cdejac
cdejac,
First, people remain at higher risk for lung cancer forever after smoking, and I see many patients who quit smoking 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, and sometimes more. The risk doesn’t go away, but at least quitting keeps the risk from rising further; and quitting helps lung function and begins to reverse the elevated risk of heart disease from smoking.
As you mentioned, there are many never-smokers who develop lung cancer — they make up about 20-25% of my lung cancer practice.
I can’t say whether there would have been any evidence of the cancer on films done for other reasons. I don’t think chest x-rays do a good job at all at detecting most cancers, so I really wouldn’t expect that an x-ray 2-3 years or longer before his cancer diagnosis would have had much of a chance of finding a cancer, even looking “through the retrospectoscope” so that you know where you should be looking for the cancer that appears later in that area. Perhaps a chest CT within a year or two of his diagnosis would have shown something, but I wouldn’t anticipate that there actually was some abnormality seen that wasn’t mentioned to him or you. Of course, I don’t know any of the specifics, but one of the things that makes lung cancer so threatening is that it’s notoriously hard to find until it’s pretty advanced. We rarely just stumble onto it, and you’re often lucky if you do, on some incidental scan done before planned gallbladder surgery. That’s how the fortunate minority detect a stage I cancer and can be treated with a high likelihood of cure.
-Dr. West
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