Submitted by James Fiorentini. Originally written for the 2018 Shine a Light Boston Event. Good evening. I am here tonight to thank the community that has taken such good care of me since I was first diagnosed over six years ago. Like most people who have survived lung cancer for more than a year or two, I was diagnosed by accident. Seven years ago, I was rushed to a local hospital and diagnosed with pneumonia. They hospitalized me for several days, took X-Rays and CT scans.

Written and submitted by: Scott MacDonald My wife Tricia recently passed away. She was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer six years ago. People look at me and my four children and wonder how we can be brave and poised in the face of such a devastating loss. The answer has a lot to do with our perspective. I look at it like this – if you were playing the odds based on the history, Tricia should have lasted about one year. At the time of her diagnosis we felt far from brave and

In the spring of 2004, a family friend, Susan Levinksy, a non-smoking 43 years old mother of 3, was diagnosed with stage IIIB lung cancer. I was shocked and thought it was a fluke as I had never heard of a non-smoker getting lung cancer. I was completely ignorant to how prevalent the disease was, and how dismal the survival rates were. In October of the same year, at the age of 42, I was taken aback when I too was diagnosed with lung cancer. I had stage I non-small cell lung

Both of my parents have lung cancer. And yes, they were smokers. They were smokers at an early age and through many decades. At the time they were diagnosed however, they had been smoke-free for 11 and 12 years. When my parents began smoking there was little known about the short and long-term effects of the habit, or its addictive nature. By the time anti-smoking campaigns became more prevalent and tobacco companies were under fire, my parents' addiction had taken hold. They