Lung cancer patients fight stigma
I’m sorry. You don’t have breast cancer,” the oncologist told Charmaine Atkenson.The 48-year-old mother of two had something far worse — stage 4 lung cancer. It had spread to her spine, bursting the bone open. It was not only a sentence of death; it was a judgment.
Even though Atkenson never smoked, she felt almost ashamed. “I found that I never would even say what kind of cancer I had. Or I would always start by saying I never smoked and I never lived with a smoker,” she said in a telephone interview.
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