Annie Chen first noticed she was unusually short of breath in 2017, while running to catch the bus home to New Jersey from her job in New York City. She told her GP, thinking of her father, who died of lung cancer at 71. But her doctor told her not to worry – her father was a heavy smoker, and Chen had never smoked.
She continued to have difficulty breathing, but it wasn’t until two years later that a doctor ordered an X-ray and Chen was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. “My whole world crashed,” she says. She was just 48, with an 11-year-old daughter, a husband who also had health issues and a mortgage to pay off.
