Lung cancer survivor runs to spread the word
Gina Hollenbecksuspected her persistent cough was more than the seasonal allergies diagnosed by her doctor.
A nurse at Baptist Memorial Hospital at the time, she went to the emergency room insisting on a chest scan. She was glad she did. Testing confirmed she had lung cancer.
“I was embarrassingly pro-active,” Hollenbeck, 41, can now laugh three years later. “I kept yelling, ‘Somebody has got to do something.’”
Being pro-active also made her a survivor. After a craniotomy to remove a tumor that had spread to her brain and losing two-thirds of her left lung, Hollenbeck is back into living. That includes running, as she did this weekend in the Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation 5K Run/Walk at Shelby Farms.
Once a runner of half-marathons before her diagnosis, Hollenbeck is now back up to five-mile runs.
“I thought my running days were over, but they weren’t,” she said. “I’ve always loved to challenge myself, and I’m very proud that I’m back to where I am.”
She’s a woman on a mission to spread the word that anyone can get lung cancer
“I thought it was very rare that anyone who was a nonsmoker got lung cancer, said Hollenback, who finished Saturday with a time of about 33 minutes. “I thought they had to be exposed to asbestos or some toxic chemical or something like that if they weren’t a smoker.”
She said she was woefully ignorant of lung cancer’s reach across the general population even though she had served on the oncology floor at St. Francis Hospital while in nursing school.
Hollenbeck, however, came face to face through her own experience with a startling statistic -- 80 percent of those diagnosed with lung cancer are nonsmokers.
“There was no family history on either side, and I didn’t smoke,” she said.
Here are some other sobering statistics from the Lung Cancer Foundation:
❚ Lung cancer kills more people than breast, colon and prostate cancer combines.
❚ Lung cancer is responsible for 25.3 percent of all cancer deaths.
❚ One in 15 people will be diagnosed with lung cancer.
To make matters worse, according to the Cancer Foundation, lung cancer research is underfunded because of the stigma that it’s a “smoker’s disease.”
Medical advances have made lung cancer at least a little less scary, Hollenbeck said.
“A lot of the technology is amazing,” she said. “I get a targeted chemotherapy pill that has basically melted away my cancer. But I can only stay on it 10-12 months, so they do a scan every few months.
“There are one or two other things I could go on if the cancer figures it out and progresses again, so we still need to do better.”
It’s also helps Hollenbeck and other lung cancer patients that Baptist has been named a Center of Excellence by the Lung Cancer Foundation, meaning it is considered one of the leading lung cancer treatment facilities in the world.
Still, there are challenging days, Hollenbeck said. One of the most difficult parts, other than battling the cancer itself, has been seeing others get sick.
“The more I talk about it, the more people reach out to me,” Hollenbeck said. “I love encouraging them, but I hate seeing them hurt. I had someone I knew from high school diagnosed the same time I was, but she died seven months later. I couldn’t understand
Hollenbeck said she has a Facebook page for people with the type of cancer she had, “and someone dies on it every week. So that’s hard.”