Doctors told young woman her persistent cough would go away it turned out to be incurable lung cancer

A UK woman who developed a cough was diagnosed with incurable lung cancer — despite never having smoked.Jade Fardon, 33, couldn’t shift her cough, but doctors reassured her it would go away on its own.It did, but it came back again and again over the years, and she returned to the general practioner several times to have her chest checked.She began to notice other things too — a hoarse voice, some nausea, increasing fatigue and night sweats.By April 2022 she compiled a list of all her symptoms for the GP — and this time was referred for a CT scan which showed extensive cancer across both her lungs.Jade, who was then 29, had never smoked, and lived a healthy active life.She didn’t need chemotherapy but was given a daily cancer drug to take which shrank the tumors and prevented them from growing.Almost two years on, metastases were found in her brain during a routine MRI scan and she needed gamma knife therapy — a precise, intensive form of radiation — to attack the lesions, which initially appeared to have been successful.But she learned one lesion had continued to progress since the treatment, when she suffered a brain bleed later that year — and she needed brain surgery to remove the lesion.She has been given new long-term medication to keep her condition stable and is regularly monitored — and is raising awareness of lung cancer in young people.Jade, a business change manager from Watford, England, said: “I had a cough but everyone thought it was Covid, and because I’m relatively young, when it went away, I didn’t suspect anything.“When I went to the doctor with my symptoms two years later, I did suspect it might be cancer, but not lung cancer.“When I got the results of my CT scan, it was already stage four and it was very scary, I was shocked and in a bit of denial.“As treatment started, for a long time, I didn’t want to hear the word ‘cancer’ at all.“When I went on the first drug, it shrunk the tumors.So when I found out th...