40-year-old mom Stephanie Williams thought a chronic mild cough was a sign of allergies, but it turned out to be something more nefarious — lung cancer.
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Williams said she first noticed the cough when picking up her daughter Liza from school in 2021. She told People, "I noticed when I picked her up, I would start talking to her and asking how her day was and I would have to cough mid-sentence. It would just kind of catch my breath for a moment."
Williams decided to bring it up to her family doctor. She asked to have a chest X-ray thinking it could be COVID. "We had a discussion on whether this could be seasonal allergies," she said, "Or we could try reflux medication."
She said, "I thought maybe I had had COVID and never known it." Her doctor did a double take when he saw the X-ray. It showed a large mass in her lung. She said, "I saw like a big cloudy oval on the right side of my chest over my lung. I remember thinking, 'What is that?'"
The 40-year-old mom realized that the scan wasn't right. Her doctor told her that she needed an urgent CT scan. That later confirmed it was lung cancer. The news shocked the 40-year-old mom, who had never smoked.
"I was what they call a 'never-smoker," she said. "There were no environmental risk factors that we identified. I didn't have a family history of lung cancer. It was really a shock because there was no, like, 'Oh yeah, you did work in that uranium mine.' There was no ground for this. There was no explanation at that time."
40-Year-Old Mom Details Cancer Battle
Williams said she had to juggle trying to be a mom to her daughter while dealing with cancer.
"Those little details, like the mother's touch, I was worried about," Williams said. "Liza has this beautiful curly hair and we use a lot of hair clips to keep it out of her face, especially when she's at school. And before my surgery, I sent a bunch of hair clips and a little bag to her teacher, with the saddest note."
She continued, "It was just like, 'Hey, I'm gonna be down for the count for a little bit and we're gonna have multiple caregivers helping out with Liza...so if her hair is in her face, can you please put it back for her?' "
"It almost makes me cry to think about," she said.
Despite being in remission, Williams doesn't fee comfortable saying she's cured. She's scared about the cancer coming back.
She said, "I've calmed down a little the farther away I get from diagnosis — that every ache and pain or every cough doesn't alarm me as much as it used to. [But] I'd be lying if I said it didn't worry me a little each time."
"The last time I thought it was nothing, it changed my life and my family's life," she said. "So I don't really have the luxury of being like, 'It's probably nothing,' because I did that once and I was dead wrong."
