My Aunt Peggy, my father's littlest sister, finally quit smoking on September 1. On September 17, she found out she has lung cancer.
We don't yet know anything about what stage it's in, but we do know there's also a "mass" on an adrenal gland, which suggests that it has already metastasized.
Of course, we are thinking positively and we're going to do everything we can to help Aunt Peggy fight this -- but statistically, her chances are very, very slim. And death from lung cancer is a hard, hard way to go.
So I want to share what my friend Rush, who is a cancer information supervisor with the American Cancer Society, said when I called him tonight:
"In case anybody wants to debate what caused this, there is no debate. With other kinds of cancers, we talk about risk factors, but with lung cancer, we talk about cause. Smoking causes it. Second-hand smoke causes it. After that, there's asbestos, there's radon exposure, but lung cancer is always environmental. And if some smoker drags out the old line, 'Well, everybody's gotta die of something,' ask him if he's ever watched a lung cancer patient go down."
Please don't smoke, and don't let anyone you care about smoke. And if you can send up a good thought for my Aunt Peggy, it would mean the world to us.
We don't yet know anything about what stage it's in, but we do know there's also a "mass" on an adrenal gland, which suggests that it has already metastasized.
Of course, we are thinking positively and we're going to do everything we can to help Aunt Peggy fight this -- but statistically, her chances are very, very slim. And death from lung cancer is a hard, hard way to go.
So I want to share what my friend Rush, who is a cancer information supervisor with the American Cancer Society, said when I called him tonight:
"In case anybody wants to debate what caused this, there is no debate. With other kinds of cancers, we talk about risk factors, but with lung cancer, we talk about cause. Smoking causes it. Second-hand smoke causes it. After that, there's asbestos, there's radon exposure, but lung cancer is always environmental. And if some smoker drags out the old line, 'Well, everybody's gotta die of something,' ask him if he's ever watched a lung cancer patient go down."
Please don't smoke, and don't let anyone you care about smoke. And if you can send up a good thought for my Aunt Peggy, it would mean the world to us.