On Nov. 15, 2023, my heart rate hit 148, and an overly assertive nurse friend nagged me to get it checked. After 20 hours in the emergency room, I was told by a cardiologist that my heart had an easily fixable glitch and not to worry – and by a pulmonologist that I had stage 4 lung cancer. 

Stage. Four. Lung. Cancer. It didn’t seem that awful because it didn’t seem believable. But wait … keep reading.

An X-ray found “shadows” followed by a CT scan. Four doctors seemed to tag team, coming in one at a time:

• ER doctor: “You have two shadows in your lungs.” I said, “You mean lung cancer?” He said “maybe. This is what lung cancer looks like in an X-ray.”
• Oncologist: “Your CT scan confirmed the shadows. Don’t ignore this,” he said. “Get a lung biopsy. It’s serious.”
• Cardiologist: “I have great news. Your rapid heart rate is minor, probably a birth defect, and can be completely cured with an ablation.”
• Pulmonologist: “You need the biopsy to confirm this, but in my 26 years of experience, this is stage four lung cancer.” He said the “good news” is medicine has progressed, and he has stage-four patients still alive six years later.

The cardiologist’s “good news” didn’t help much.

While waiting for the biopsy results, we hung our hope on the lack of other symptoms. (Note to others: The correct answer to “Have you experienced any unexpected weight loss?” is not “I wish.”)

A week later – the day before Thanksgiving – I had a lung biopsy. Six days after that we got the results: It’s scar tissue and junk left over after a major infection – junk my body was slowing moving out. Champagne was poured, conversations had, and the rest of my circle wrote it off as a bad moment in my life.

Three weeks after that – nine days before Christmas – the pulmonologist wasn’t as joyful during an online follow-up appointment: “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I think you still have lung cancer,” he said. He then proceeded to draw me a picture showing a) a circle that represented one of my tumors, b) a line that represented the needle, and c) arrows showing how it missed the cancer part. He wanted me to get a skull-to-thigh PET Scan.

Here we enter a gray area for medical insurance. Because my planned retirement occurred on the last day of December, I switched to Medicare on Jan. 1, 2024. But here’s the rub: I couldn’t prove it. The government assured me that I would have retroactive coverage back to Jan. 1 once they completed the paperwork (I applied in early Nov.), but that still didn’t happen until the third week in January. For those who don’t understand Medicare (no one does) Part B covers 80% of doctor visits. Supplement plans – like the ones you see gobs of ads for around Thanksgiving – cover the rest. But you can’t get that supplement until you first get the card proving you have Part B, potentially leaving me on the hook for 20% of all costs.

Confused? Don’t reread the last paragraph. Just let it go.

On Feb. 9, I had a breathing test. On Feb. 13, I had a PET Scan. On Feb. 28, I got the official PET Scan results. It showed yellow in my lungs, meaning cells were active, which often confirms cancer, but it’s not necessarily cancer. It could, in fact, be my loyal cells hauling old infection out of my lungs like ants carting off a dead worm. 

The pulmonologist ordered a bronchoscopy.

On March 18, I saw a different pulmonologist who “does more bronchoscopies than any other doctor in the U.S.” He was on the ground floor of robotic procedures and trains other doctors, and they may use mine for training other physicians. Keep an eye out for me.

At the end of the bronchoscopy on March 26, the doctor who performed the procedure came into recovery and told my daughter and me that he thought it was cancer, as did his assistant. However, he said another doctor in the room observing the bronchoscopy “doesn’t think it’s cancer, so don’t tell anyone it is until the biopsy comes back.”

About a week later, the test results were posted online. It took a few Google medical-word searches to understand it in layman’s terms, but the results confirmed the earlier lung biopsy diagnosis: scar tissue and the remains of an infection.

Suddenly, everything stopped. There was no joyful celebration – that was four months earlier after the lung biopsy. Doctors didn’t call; new appointments weren’t made. My kids and everyone else in my life had moved on fourth months earlier, mainly because I didn’t provide any updates after the lung biopsy results. My imminent death faded away.

You’d think this is a joyful story of celebration, of hearing that the worst health news possible ends with, “Never mind.” But my brain had already switched to “You don’t have long to live mode,” and I pretty much arrived at Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ fifth stage of acceptance. Maybe dying’s not so great, but I could stop mowing the lawn in Florida summers, and my 401(k) money only had to last a few years. That could subsidize a few pretty grand vacations with the family.

But now I might live for decades? I’m having trouble slipping back into “world is your oyster” mode, and using my imminent death story only as an anecdote to retell at parties.

Another hard part: I feel guilt when others get a cancer diagnosis, as if I received an unjust reward. I silently wonder, “Why a ‘miracle’ for me?”

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