As Joanna Thompson thinks back to the many lung cancer screenings she’s done over the years at Highlands Oncology in Springdale, one patient always springs to mind – the very first one whose screening revealed cancer in its early stages.Â
“She came in for her scan, and it showed an abnormal spot, so she went through the process of (us) deciding ‘Do we think this is a cancer?'” Thompson says.Â
In this patient’s case, it was indeed lung cancer. But catching it in stage one meant that treatment included only a surgery to remove the spot. The patient didn’t have to undergo chemotherapy or any of the precarious sickness of the later stages.Â