‘I’m lucky to be here:’ one woman's unexpected diagnosis
When pediatrician Sanda Cohen developed a cough in the fall of 2018, she wrote it off as being due to seasonal allergies. “The cough didn’t stop me from doing anything,” she tells Yahoo Life.
But Cohen, 63, noticed that her cough got worse around the middle of November, and she started having other symptoms. “I noticed the week of Thanksgiving that I was short of breath,” she says. “I was trying to do some minor things around the house and I became so short of breath that my husband took me to the ER.”
Cohen says she thought she picked up pneumonia from one of her patients “or a weird viral thing…I certainly wasn’t expecting the diagnosis that came over the next few days.”
At the hospital, Cohen was given a chest X-ray. “They came back and said it was kind of cloudy and they wanted to do a CT scan next,” she says. But Cohen says she and her husband, who are both doctors, “knew they were looking for something else.”
She was initially diagnosed with pneumonia by the doctors in the ER and given antibiotics, as her scans were sent to a radiologist. But the radiologist saw something different. “It looked like I had a large mass in the upper right lobe of my lung, and a lot of fluid,” Cohen says. She was admitted to the Norton Healthcare hospital soon after.
“They couldn’t at that point say if it was benign or cancerous but it was certainly suspicious for cancer,” Cohen says. “I was in shock but certainly not denial—the doctor handed me the report to read myself.”
Cohen says she was “still hopeful” that the mass was linked to pneumonia, but knew that “the next few days would be very telling.”
Cohen was admitted to the hospital on Saturday; By Sunday she was told that her diagnosis was “very bad…it was stage 4 lung cancer.”
‘How did this happen?’
Even though Cohen knew doctors suspected she had cancer, she says her diagnosis was “an extreme shock.”
“This is not what I would expect. I was a healthy person,” she says. “I certainly wasn’t expecting lung cancer. I never smoked, my parents weren’t smokers.”
Cohen says she had heard that lung cancer was impacting more never-smokers. As many as 20 percent of people who die from lung cancer each year have never smoked, according to the American Cancer Society. “But if it doesn’t affect you directly, it doesn’t resonate with you,” Cohen says. “This was a total surprise. I remember thinking, ‘How did this happen?’”
Limited treatment options
Cohen was given more tests to try to determine where the cancer was in her body. Those found it was in her right lung and lymph nodes.
But, because her cancer is stage 4, her treatment options are limited. “I wasn’t a candidate for surgery,” she says. So, she was given chemotherapy and immunotherapy. “I was started on two chemotherapy drugs and an immunotherapy drug at once,” Cohen says. “It just was 11 days from the time of my diagnosis to when I got my first treatment.”
Cohen also had to take leave from her job. “I couldn’t be around sick children while I was doing chemotherapy and immunotherapy,” she says. “But I was still hoping to get back to work at some point.” But by June of 2019, Cohen realized that wouldn’t be possible. “I had just finished six months of chemo, and I just didn’t feel like I could handle being around sick children,” she says. “That was a large part of my job.” So, she retired.
Now, Cohen says she receives infusions of the immunotherapy drug Keytruda every three weeks. “So far, so good,” she says. “Keytruda has been a miracle. I know that I wouldn’t be here without it.”
Overall, Cohen says she feels “pretty good,” although she struggles with fatigue. “I don’t have the energy I used to,” she says. Cohen also has some itchiness as a side effect of her medication. “But I feel happy and fortunate that I’m still here,” she says. “Obviously, no one wants stage 4 cancer. I know I’m lucky to be here.”
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