Torch, Summer 1999

4 Torch Donna: We were on vacation, and the weekend before we were water skiing and tubing with some friends of ours in North Carolina. I felt as if I had a lingering cold. I was having a little bit of shortness of breath, so I thought I might even have walking pneumonia. I went to the doctor the next morning, and we talked about some possibilities; perhaps I had developed asthma later in life, perhaps I needed to get an over– the-counter cough syrup to handle the cough. Finally, he said, "Before you leave, let me take a chest x-ray." Later, the doctor asked me to come to his office and look at the x-ray. He showed me the x-ray and said, "It looks like you have about a liter of fluid in your right lung, and that is why you are having shortness of breath. Shortness of breath is the symptom, but I think the cause is this spot right here," and he pointed to it. Of course, when I heard the word "spot," I immediately thought "tumor," and then I thought "cancer."