Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hi! My name is stephanie Deasy. I am from Lynchburg Virginia.
I'm 42 years old uh... 41 actually, I'll be 42 years old.
I'm a mother of two. And um...
I was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer uh... exactly one year ago.
It's um...
It was July 2010.
And um... I always been in fitness; for about the last 20 years. And
I've been running group fitness programs and
teaching people about nutrition and group fitness. I've been a personal trainer.
I'm a presenter for one of the national organizations. So, always been into health.
I um... didn't feel well for
just a couple of weeks. I had been a little short of breath. I had a cough
but just thought it was allergy related and
Anyway, went to the doctor and they said I had pneumonia; so, a walking pneumonia.
So, I figured that's all I had and this was the weekend of July 4th.
I think it was about july 9th by the time they... I uh
They put me through a couple of tests and figured out it was pneumonia;
put me on an antibiotic and
ten days later it wasn't gone.
Put me through more blood tests and anyway... kept putting me through all these tests and
I was wondering why for pneumonia?
But it wasn't going away and they obviously thought it was something more.
Went back to my regular doctor after ten days. uh... he continued doing tests and
sent me on to a lung specialist at this point, because we tried; I said just try a different
antibiotic. I'm sure it's
You know, pneumonia. We'll take care of it; we'll get rid of it.
He sent me to a lung um...
a specialists. And they put me through a series of tests. And
last test he brought me into his office and
told me I had stage 4 lung cancer.
What do you do with that?
I jumped out of my body basically and uh...
He was continuing to talk and
tell me it wasn't good. um... I had a very rare kind of lung cancer. I; It's a kind that
attacks women who don't smoke, in their 40's; I had just turned 40.
I've never smoked.
And all he could stay is in his 30 years of practicing he'd only seen
maybe 3 or 4 cases.
And he was very sorry.
OK. That's all you can give me...