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 mutation is not usually seen in smokers so smoking probably didn’t cause it per se, but no one knows whether or not the first mutation that started me down this path happened back then, waiting patiently for other mutations to join it and create a cancerous cell. This post is Kelli’s show … read more on Anita Figueras’ blog “scifiknitter”