Thousands of Georgians are diagnosed with lung cancer each year, and you don’t have to be a smoker

Lung cancer is the number one leading cause of cancer death in the United States, and November is Lung Cancer Awareness Month.

It's estimated that more than 7,000 Georgians will be diagnosed with lung cancer this year. Nearly 4,000 of them are estimated to die from the disease.

Channel 2′s Karyn Greer sat down with Lindsay Wagner Johnson who wants others to know that, like her, you don't have to be a smoker to be diagnosed with lung cancer.

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"I thought I was doing all the right things: eating well, working out every day and especially never smoking. So hearing those words, you have lung cancer, not only lung cancer, but stage four, terminal lung cancer," she explained.

The 41-year-old Dunwoody wife and mom's life was changed forever in 2022 when she was diagnosed with stage 4 adenocarcinoma lung cancer with ALK-positive gene mutation, metastatic to her brain, liver and bones.

"They did the biopsy of the liver. She came back in and she said, 'Have you ever smoked before?' And I said, 'No, not a day in my life,'" Johnson said.

When they did a PET scan, doctors found multiple tumors on her brain and that the cancer had spread through her spine, ribs, pelvis and hip bones.

"They sort of sent me home to die. But there's a new drug on the market, Erlotinib . Dr. Carlisle at Emory: she saved me," Johnson said.

Dr. Eric Flenaugh, the Director of the Lung Nodule Clinic at Grady Memorial Hospital, says her story isn't rare.

"Even though there's three times as much breast cancer and three times as much prostate cancer that are diagnosed each year, lung cancer is the number one killer," Flenaugh said.

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Johnson and Flenaugh agree that early detection is critical and many people ignore symptoms.

"Now that we're able to detect earlier and find these earlier stages, we can link in people who might have other risk factors that go beyond smoking or smoking may actually make it worse, especially like specific genes," Flenaugh said.

"Unfortunately, there's not a cure for this right now. But I believe that with medical research and everything that is happening right now, I'm still here," Johnson said.

Symptoms don't typically appear until the disease is already at an advanced stage, making lung cancer screening critical to finding it early when it may be easier to treat.

You should contact your doctor if you have a persistent cough, including coughing up blood, wheezing or shortness of breath, chest pain, hoarseness or unexplained weight loss.