Belief is that smokers get what they deserve
Top killer gets less funding than other cancersÂ
Sixty-three-year-old Judy Yuz smoked all her life and now has terminal lung cancer. To society, she got what she deserved.
It’s a stigma that comes with few other kinds of cancer or disease.
“The first thing people ask when they find out you have lung cancer is, `Did you smoke?’” Yuz said.
“I have the feeling people think, `You did it to yourself.’ Well, yes, I did do it to myself but smoking wasn’t bad when I started and I couldn’t quit.”
Lung cancer kills more Canadians than breast, colon and prostate cancer combined, yet it gets little public attention or funding for research.
“That’s a striking, striking, striking statistic but the public doesn’t realize it,” said Dr. Sunil Verma, an oncologist at Sunnybrook hospital, who treats both breast and lung cancer patients and sees the vast differences between how they are perceived.
Yuz never had any symptoms and only discovered she had Stage 3 lung cancer when she had an X-ray while in hospital being treated for another condition.
The cancer had already spread from one lung to her lymph nodes. She had radical radiation and chemotherapy but it eventually spread to her other lung.
Unlike breast, colon and prostate cancers, there are no reliable screening tools to detect it early, said Verma. That’s largely because money isn’t being invested to find one.
Only 5 to 10 per cent of lung cancer patients survive for five years but that could increase to 70 per cent with early detection, he said.
“If we had better screening and more funding going to this disease, we would have better survival.”
While society blames the victims of lung cancer, about 15 per cent of them never smoked and another 40 per cent quit long before they got it, Verma said.
“If somebody smoked and got heart disease, we don’t have the same reaction,” he said.
“We have to change the way we look at it, as well as making sure nobody else smokes.”
Lung Cancer Canada is hosting a round table meeting today at Sunnybrook to brainstorm strategies for raising awareness and decreasing the stigmaattached to the disease.
This year, an estimated 22,700 Canadians will be diagnosed with lung cancer and 19,300 will die. It remains the leading cause of cancer death for both men and women and continues to rise in women.
Yuz is trying to access a drug called Tarceva that has recently been approved by the Ontario drug quality and therapeutics committee on a case-by-case basis. It won’t cure her but it could extend her life for several months or even a year.
The drug costs $2,300 a month and there is no way of predicting who will benefit. Some patients will pay for it themselves for a month to see if it will work.
That drug took over a year to approve, said Verma, while Herceptin, a drug for breast cancer, was approved within a month after it was shown to prevent the recurrence of breast cancer in some women.
Lung Cancer Canada, the only national support group for the disease, has launched a campaign to try to change its image.
“People don’t know that it’s the leading cause of cancer death — they’re amazed,” said Catherine Black, a director of the association.
“There’s a perception that if you smoked, you are to be blamed. Even those who quit smoking feel under that umbrella.”
Her husband, a smoker, died of the disease last year and every time he went for a test, he was asked if he smoked, she said.
“It reinforces it in the poor patient. You smoke, smoke, smoke.”
But some lung cancer patients are so addicted to tobacco that “you see them puffing outside Sunnybrook while they’re waiting for chemotherapy or radiation.”
Lung cancer affects not only those who have it but their caregivers, who also feel guilty, said Verma.
“My sister has been working since she was 16 and I feel she could use some consideration,” said Eleanor Kates, Yuz’s sister.
“But I get the sense the government feels if this drug isn’t going to cure you, why should they spend the money.
“I think people who have worked and paid their taxes deserve any help they can get,” she said.
“You see so many people and they’re all in the same position.”
Because they feel guilty, lung cancer patients often don’t fight against their disease, Verma said.
“They feel they got what people told them they would get; they knew the risks associated with it,” he said.
“Then they say, `Now I have to suffer,’ instead of that fighting you get with breast cancer where patients say, `Why me?’”
Judy Yuz is a fighter. Twenty-five years ago, her son Steven, then 8, died at the Hospital for Sick Children after an early misdiagnosis. He was vomiting severely but doctors decided his illness was psychosomatic, and at one point, forced him to clean it up himself. It was later found that he had a rare twisted bowel.
Yuz fought for eight years to have the doctors involved disciplined by the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons.
Eventually, two of them were given a verbal reprimand.
Now, she’s fighting for her own life.
“I could have been a lot smarter but that’s no reason to label me,” she said. “We don’t get a lot of sympathy.”
If Yuz had a heart attack, she adds, “no one would ask me how much fast food I ate.”
