Teresa Schumacher is "one in a million."
Schumacher, 53, was diagnosed with small cell lung cancer in June 2005. Although survival rates for SCLC are low, she has beaten the odds after undergoing chemotherapy and the cancer has not returned.
SCLC is found primarily in smokers and former smokers. But unlike many forms of lung cancer, the risk of developing small cell lung cancer does not decrease after a person quits smoking.
"I don't feel the hang of death anymore," Schumacher said while sitting in a conference room at the Hyatt Hotel Tuesday night. A recent Positron Emission Tomography scan found no cancer anywhere in her body. She credits her survival to a positive attitude and the numerous advances researchers have made in the last 10 years.
Schumacher was one of the women who attended the symposium, titled "Women and Lung Cancer: The Gender Specific Facts," in New Brunswick. The Lung Cancer Circle of Hope, a statewide grassroots organization, sponsored the event.
Approximately 30 people, mostly women who had survived lung cancer, attended the event.
The LCCH focuses on dispelling myths about the disease such as lung cancer being an old man's disease, only a smoker's disease or that more women dying of breast cancer than lung cancer.
LCCH President Susan Levin opened the event and introduced the speakers.
Levin founded the group in 2005 after her mother, a "never" smoker, passed away after a battle with the disease.
"I realized that no organization based in New Jersey looked at lung cancer," Levin said, adding that too many people think if they don't smoke, they won't die from lung cancer. "One out of five [who have lung cancer] never smoked."
Mika Sovak, an oncologist at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey, and Jill Siegfried, the co-director of the Cancer Program at the University of Pittsburgh, spoke at the event.
Siegfried explained how tobacco company owner R.J. Reynolds "fired" mascot Joe Camel in 1997, but the number of cigarette smokers has not decreased since 1960.
"There is somewhat of a blaming of the victims [because smoking increases a person's risk of contracting the disease,]" Sovak said, adding the stigma attached to victims affects the amount of funding and attention lung cancer receives.
"Nobody deserves to get lung cancer," Sovak said, as she addressed the crowd with a graph behind her showing the number of fatalities from lung cancer and breast cancer last year.
Lung cancer killed approximately 160,000 people, which is four times the amount of people who died as a result of breast cancer, according to the chart. Yet federal funding per death was 10 times higher for breast cancer victims, according to the LCCH Web site.
Sovak said approximately 30,000 people who have rarely or never smoked are affected by lung cancer per year, and two-thirds of those are women. Never smokers are people who have had less than 100 cigarettes in their lives.
But smoking is not the only cause of lung cancer. Exposure to asbestos and radon, a chemical found in soil, are other common causes.
Estrogen also plays a role in the growth of cancerous cells. Researchers are working on drugs that will affect estrogen levels and cut off the blood supply to tumors, Siegfried said.
"Our voices may be small but we need to be loud," Levin said about the lack of funding for the disease.
Sovak said President George W. Bush has recently vetoed a bill that would provide researchers with money to study the disease.
But Gov. Jon S. Corzine recently became the first governor in the United States to declare November as Lung Cancer Awareness Month, largely due to the efforts of groups such as the LCCH.
Levin said groups who lobby often receive more research funding, adding that it is not always the number of people affected by a certain cancer that determines funding, but how hard they push for it.
These efforts give cancer victims and survivors hope, Schumacher said, and hope makes all the difference.
"I have always had the attitude that whatever it is, it is," she said. "The diagnosis of cancer did cause me to question a lot of beliefs."
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