What started my blogging about cancer is a small website I posted recently for the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center. It’s just a few pages — no big investment in time either to post or to read — but it’s packed with great information. Specifically, it’s on Cancer and Women, with a focus on prevention.

Given my family, the lung cancer page in particular caught my attention. I’ve never smoked a day in my life, but for years I’ve had this nagging sense that I’m more susceptible to lung cancer than most. That’s because my maternal grandmother, who never smoked a day in her life, died of lung cancer, and now my mother, who never smoked a day in her life, has COPD (or Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease). As for me, I’ve always been, as my mother puts it, “a bit chesty.” In other words, I’m inclined towards things like asthma and bronchitis.

But that lung cancer seems more likely for me than say breast cancer has always been just a gut feeling. I’d never read anything to indicate that lung cancer might be hereditary — until I posted this site. And there, in a few short sentences, it says, more or less, that researchers have the same feeling I do. Of course they say it in a much more scientific way. “Researchers are finding that lung cancer in women is biologically different from lung cancer in men, according to the American Society of Clinical Oncology. There may be genetic and biologic differences that affect lung cancer development.”

Having said that, I don’t know what to do about it. Early detection of lung cancer is rare. I get mammograms routinely and don’t mind having colonoscopies either (though my family has no history of either breast or colon cancer). I’d be happy to be screened for lung cancer if there were as easy a way to do this. But there isn’t. I just hope some of the amazing researchers I’m so fortunate to work with discover something. And maybe I can help them by finding a clinical trial on lung cancer prevention to participate in.

The bottom line is I’m happy to help in whatever way possible to eradicate this horrible disease. And right now, one easy thing I can do is to spread the word. I can speak up by blogging. So I commend to you VICC’s Cancer & Women site.