Pam Johnson smoked cigarettes for 45 years. She quit the day she had surgery for stage 3 lung cancer.
“I was anxious and worried,” says Johnson about the day she received her diagnosis in 2010. Her primary care physician had ordered routine blood work that came back abnormal. He ordered a chest x-ray as follow-up to rule out obvious causes of the abnormality. The chest X-ray revealed a suspicious spot in her right lung and a follow-up biopsy confirmed that it was cancerous.
Johnson says there was no question in her mind where she would go to get care: “UC and the Barrett Center—it’s the best institution in town for cancer care.”