Hi,

It’s been quite a while since I have been on the forum. I was diagnosed with a squamous cell carcinoma in my left lung back in January 2013 and had surgery to remove it in march of the same year. They removed the upper lobe and a part of the lower lobe and two ribs as it has spread into the chest wall. I then had a course of chemotherapy followed by radiotherapy every weekday for a month. It wasn’t an easy journey by any means but I survived and 13 years later I am still here. Unfortunately I developed a kidney cancer a couple of years after that which was unrelated. I had this removed robotically with no chemotherapy or radiotherapy this time. Life of course has been different but not bad. On one of my annual scans a tumour was picked up last year (2025) which was diagnosed as a phaeochromocytoma on my left adrenal gland. It may have been my third tumour but it wasn’t cancerous. This was also removed robotically. 

My point in sharing my cancer journey is to show that even lung cancer has survivors that have lived over ten years despite having complications along the way. I know that not everyone survives this disease, the statistics at the time of my lung cancer were only 1 in 9 people survived for 10 years and my thoughts all the way through my journey were that there was no reason why I couldn’t be that 1 in 9.

I have just read in the latest cancer research booklet that 'only around 1 in 10 people diagnosed with lung cancer survive for 10 years or more'. If you are going through a cancer journey please try to think positively because that 1 could be you.

Nannie Dee x