We Need To Be Catching Lung Cancer Early — Survivor Amanda Kouri Advocates For New Detection Methods

“I want everyone’s story to be like my story,” 28-year-old lung cancer survivor Amanda Kouri says. “That they go in, and they don’t feel well, and they catch it at stage one, and it can be removed.”

Amanda has become an advocate for lung cancer research because most people who get the disease don’t have stories like her’s. When she first began to feel symptoms, doctors wrote it off as her asthma acting up. Nobody thought to give her a CT scan because of her age. Amanda is so lucky that she saw many doctors, and her disease eventually was caught at an early stage … because lung cancer becomes incredibly hard to treat when it gets into the later stages. “The reason why lung cancer is so deadly is because it’s caught so late because we assume that everyone smokes or we assume that it only happens to 65-year-old people,” Amanda says, “when it’s really a terrible disease that can take anyone at any age, any gender, any race … and we’re not looking for it.”