But after months of treatment, her cough persisted and she began to feel pain in her lungs. An x-ray finally revealed that Taylor, at 28 years old, had a large and rapidly-growing tumor in her right lung.
She had adenocarcinoma, a form of non-small cell lung cancer, the most common type of lung cancer found in young, non-smoking women. By the time it was diagnosed, it had advanced to Stage IV, meaning the disease had spread beyond her lung.
“I was very confused. I almost could not believe that someone my age, who was healthy and went hiking and played volleyball, could get lung cancer,” Taylor says.
Ingrid Nunez was also diagnosed with Stage IV adenocarcinoma. She was 19 years old. “At first we thought it was Hodgkin’s Lymphoma [a form of blood cancer] because at least that’s a little more common in people my age,” she said.
The average age of someone diagnosed with lung cancer is about 70. Only 2 to 3 percent of the 228,190 people diagnosed with lung cancer in 2013 are younger than 40.
Nunez says the only sign that something was wrong was a small bump on her left collarbone. “It had never bothered me and I felt fine,” she says. “I thought it was nothing.”