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Profiles in Lung Cancer: Kelli “Cat” Joseph, Survivor Lung Cancer Awareness Month 2015 Day 16: Kelli “Cat” Joseph, Survivor “If there was ever a time in history to get lung cancer, that time is now.” Each day during Lung Cancer Awareness Month (November), a lung cancer blogger will share a profile of someone involved with lung cancer. The person profiled might be a patient, caregiver, advocate, researcher, or healthcare provider. My own observation about the online lung cancer advocacy community: although smoking causes an awful lot of lung cancer, most advocates whose work I know about are never-smokers. Why aren’t more people with a history of smoking involved in advocacy work? I don’t know. The stigma against lung cancer runs deep in our culture, so shame and guilt may keep people silent, even when it’s in their own best interest to speak up. I’ll say up front that I am an ex-smoker. I quit in 1981 after accumulating a 7 pack-year history. My cancer’s driver muta...

Profiles in Lung Cancer: Naomi Farley, Caregiver Lung Cancer Awareness Month 2015 Day 4: Naomi Farley, Caregiver “Hope is so important...” November is Lung Cancer Awareness Month, and each day a lung cancer blogger will share a profile of someone involved with lung cancer. The person profiled might be a patient, caregiver, advocate, researcher, or healthcare provider. I knew that I wanted to interview Naomi Farley when I saw that she is a caregiver and that her husband Corky is in a clinical trial. When I talked to her on the phone and read her answers to my questions, I discovered that there are parallels between Naomi and Corky’s life and the life that my husband Robert and I share. Both couples have been together about 40 years, and each family has a child mid-20’s in age. Corky and I share the same EGFR driver mutation, and both Corky and I have retired due to our lung cancers. Finally, Corky and I are in the same clinical trial, a TIGER trial testing the efficacy o...