Getting a horrible cough that won’t go away is something most of us have experienced at one point or another. Nancy Vandespool can relate to having a terrible cough—except her cough lasted approximately 3 years. It wasn’t until she had severe back pain and started coughing blood, that this led her to visit the hospital where she was diagnosed with not only kidney stones, but also non-small cell lung cancer.
Vandespool was shocked at the cancer diagnosis. She was in her late 30’s when she was first diagnosed with the disease and asked, “Why me, I don’t even smoke.” Her back pain was related to the kidney stones, but the coughing of blood was not, which is why her doctor ran additional tests, discovering the chilling diagnosis.
“I was shocked, I even called the doctor a liar because I couldn’t believe it. I never smoked and I always associated lung cancer with smoking,” explains Vandespool. She even thought maybe the doctor had grabbed the wrong chart that belonged to another patient, which unfortunately was not the case.
