Lung cancer survivor who never smoked advocates for research

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    SHREVEPORT, La. (KTBS) — Beth Ward was a working physical therapist in May 2015.

“I was going and blowing 90 miles an hour and had absolutely no symptoms of being ill until these lymph nodes came up on the side of my neck,” Ward said.

She ignored them for a couple of months.

“But they didn’t go away,” Ward said.

So she got them checked out, and after an X-ray, her doctor noticed a small spot in her left upper lung.

“They did a biopsy on the lymph nodes and it came back as a stage four pulmonary adenocarcinoma nonsmall cell lung cancer,” she said.

Lung cancer is thought to be a smokers’ disease, but Ward said, “I have never smoked cigarettes or anything.”

And yet, her life was upended.

“I got rounds of chemotherapy and radiation, got very ill after the radiation and got septic, which is infection all over your whole body,” she said. “And I was dying, and in ICU for three and a half weeks.”

It took a year and eight months and multiple surgeries for her to get back to doing the work she loved as a physical therapist.

“But then the cancer came back three more times,” Ward said.

And three more times she fought it. In the last five years, medicine has progressed, and immunotherapy helped her to fight off cancer. She’s now in a state known as “no evidence of disease.”

“We call him Ned — no evidence of disease — and he’s my guy. He’s very fickle, though. He’ll come and go out of my life. So Ned and I are together right now and I want him to put a ring on it,” she said with a smile.

But due to radiation treatment under her arm for cancerous lymph nodes, she has lingering issues.

“… some numbness and weakness in my dominant left hand, and you see I’m wearing a sleeve and also have lymphedema in that arm because I don’t have any of the lymph flow out of that arm,” she said.

So, she currently can’t work in her PT profession. But she is working as an advocate for awareness and research funding for lung cancer. Ward has actively fought all the way to Washington, D.C. with the Lung Cancer Alliance.

“To dispel the myth of the stigma of smoking, so that we can get more federal research dollars for lung cancer research because we need it. It only gets 6% of the federal research dollars for all cancers, but it kills more than prostate, colon, and breast cancer combined every year,” she explains. “One in 15 people gets lung cancer.”

While she is free from cancer now, Ward’s battle continues.

“I’m just happy to be alive now and able to tell my story and raise awareness that you don’t if you have lungs, you can get lung cancer. You know you don’t have to have been a smoker. In fact, 20% of the cases were never smokers. It’s amazing,” she said.

One thing Ward hopes to change is the ability for healthy people who don’t smoke to be screened for lung cancer. Screening is generally offered to people 55 and older who smoked heavily for many years.

Symptoms of lung cancer include pain in the chest or ribs, shortness of breath, and increased coughing, sometimes producing blood. But these symptoms do not typically appear until lung cancer is at an advanced stage.

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