Fighting Through Advanced Lung Cancer 

How Eugenia Horan trusted her gut about her diagnosis. 

On February 15, 2019, a five-centimeter tumor was found in the apex of my right lung, along with another atop my right bronchus. Already an anxious person, I was beyond terrified—especially since getting the diagnosis had been challenging. While I had classic lung cancer symptoms and a smoking history, the doctors were thrown off by my younger than average age. I pushed for bloodwork to be done, and found myself having a CT scan within hours of receiving the test results. Three days later, I was told I would need two lobes of my lung removed. I didn’t feel there was much hope.   

I had the option of surgery, but I opted out because the tumor atop my main bronchus—the one cutting off my air—couldn’t be reached.  

I tried the desperate things so many other patients are doing right now. When it became hard to eat and impossible to walk within four months, my husband carried me into a different hospital.  

After a few tests, one of which was incorrectly administered, I received palliative dual chemotherapy. I lasted five weeks before I passed out in a hypercapnic breathing emergency. The ER head told my husband there was nothing else they could do. Undeterred, he had me taken by ambulance to a different hospital. There, they’d find the tumor on my bronchus had grown to cover 95% of my trachea. Friable, it was also bleeding. I was put into a coma. That tumor was removed over 10 days, but more were found in my small intestine. I was stage 4 and in the ICU.  

My treatment board was erased. I was told essentially to wait for death. My weight now in the 60s, I knew it wasn’t going to be long. I was mechanically ventilated and had staph pneumonia in my only working lung. I felt I only had days left. I was mute; I held up my dry-erase white board, my only way to communicate, and wrote: “HOSPICE, PLEASE.”  

After 25 days in the ICU, I was home. I began to eat, because I’d heard the doctor say starvation—not cancer—was killing me. In the hospital, I also heard about a medication called Keytruda that might help, but I was unable to get it. After six days of bites of food and PEG tube feeds in hospice, I was anxious to fight. I had my husband carry me and my now copious medical supplies back to my original oncologist to advocate for myself and trying Keytruda, now that I was officially outpatient. I was weak, very ill, ECOG 4, had one working lung, and was unable to walk or stay in a wheelchair. I didn’t give up and made my case for 45 minutes. It was prescribed.  

That was all I needed. I learned to eat, speak, and walk again by myself. Keytruda melted the 17-centimeter tumor and my lung reinflated 15 days after my first infusion. By my fourth infusion, I gained 60 pounds and was normal except for the trach scar, the PEG scar, and the zipper scar from taking out six inches of small bowel.  
  
I have been free of cancer since the initial post-Keytruda scan in December 2019. I’m still told by doctors that I’m terminal. I remind them I wasn’t expected to survive beyond August 2019, but I did. Because I always believed. Never once did I ever give up. 

I’ve now been a patient advocate for five years and have published a book about my year in end-stage cancer care, and my three-month recovery from three days to live. Now, I get to help others. I get to save lives. It seems like a decent trade-off. 

Whether you are a patient, survivor, caregiver, or loved one touched by cancer, your story can have an enormous impact. You can provide hope and inspiration to someone recently diagnosed with cancer or a patient undergoing therapy.

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