My name is Tim Smith and I am a 35-year-old nonsmoker with a beautiful wife and two little boys ages 5 and 8. I was diagnosed with stage 4 non-small cell ALK+ on November 8, 2018. I had been having shoulder pain for a few days and woke up one morning with a swollen neck and severe pain. A friend and my wife convinced me to go to the ER where they found that I had a blood clot in my right internal jugular vein and subclavian vein. With further scans, we found lung cancer. I was released from the hospital after four days and placed on a blood thinner. My oncologist and the rest of the staff at the treatment center I go to are amazing, and I’m so blessed to have them on my team. Anyone can get lung cancer, and it’s seldom diagnosed early enough to be readily treatable. Advances are being made in targeted therapies, designed to target specific gene mutations in lung cancer, like ALK, but much more research is needed.
