Runner and Non-Smoker, 44, Diagnosed With Lung Cancer: ‘I’m Not Unique’

Shira Kupperman Boehler went on a 6-mile run the morning before doctors told her they suspected she had lung cancer. She didn’t believe them.

The 44-year-old finance investment analyst and mom of four had no symptoms — no shortness of breath, no unexplained weight loss, no chest pain. There’s no family history of the disease, and she wouldn’t dare smoke. “My dad’s a lung doctor!” she’d remind friends when they offered her cigarettes in college.

In the days after her 2025 diagnosis, “I kept telling (my doctors), ‘Wrong person. Wrong scan,’” Boehler recalls to TODAY.com.

She joked about pursuing a malpractice case, but, even if she’d been serious, it never came to be. Boehler did, in fact, have a tumor in her lung.

Now, she raises awareness of rising lung cancer rates and the research that’s found increasing diagnoses among young people — women and non-smokers in particular. The once-narrow profile for lung cancer patients is widening, and she’s advocating for policy change to help catch more cases earlier.

A Surprising Scan

Boehler had been mentally preparing herself for a cancer diagnosis, just not this kind.

“My mom had breast cancer when I was a senior in college,” she says. “And I have always been very adamant about getting my mammograms.” Though she didn’t have any genetic markers for breast cancer, prioritizing her health shaped her lifestyle.

She and her husband have gotten genome sequencing, she runs daily, she’s “in shape,” and she describes herself as “the annoying mom who says, ‘snacks out of the fridge only; no pantry food,’” to her kids.

When her husband suggested they get full-body MRIs in the summer of 2025, the choice was easy. And when Boehler’s scan showed a 3.8-centimeter mass in her lung, radiologists said not to worry because she wasn’t symptomatic.

Still, she ran the scan by her pulmonologist father and a doctor friend. Both said she could book a low-dose CT scan, the detailed X-ray doctors typically use for lung screenings, if she was curious. At first, “I kind of pushed it aside,” Boehler recalls, then she found herself considering it.

Her first low-dose CT scan on Sept. 26, 2025, showed that the tumor had grown. Then, a more detailed low-dose CT scan three days later and then a bronchoscopy the day after that — during which a doctor used an illuminated tube to look at her lungs and take a tissue sample — confirmed she had Stage 1B lung cancer on Oct. 1, 2025. It was adenocarcinoma, the most common type of cancer starting in the organs, according to the Cleveland Clinic.

“I just couldn’t wrap my head around it,” Boehler says.

Rising Rates and Advocacy

Everything that happened next happened fast. On Oct. 6, 2025, five days after she was diagnosed, Boehler had surgery to remove the cancer.

“They took out my middle-right lobe and the lower half of my right-upper lobe,” two of the three lobes in the right lung, she explains.

“I started running again in November, and I feel fine,” Boehler adds.

“Sometimes I think it was fake or a dream or something messed up,” she says. “I … basically had lung cancer for a week.”

She says she’s lucky. She had personal connections to medical professionals who gave her advice and advocated for quick treatment at the hospital. Now she wants to pay it forward.

“I’m not unique,” she says.

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death, according to the National Institutes of Health, and one in four lung cancer patients has never smoked. Increasingly, those getting diagnosed are women. The American Cancer Society found higher rates of lung cancer among women younger than 54, compared to men in the same age range.

“If you have lungs, you can get lung cancer,” says Boehler.

And the disease can often be silent, displaying vague or no symptoms at all, as was the case with Boehler. The cancer is often found by accident, when someone is getting imaging for a completely different reason.

“We need people to be scanned,” Boehler insists, advocating for regular screenings similar to those done annually for breast cancer.

Screenings can help find lung cancer early, when it’s much more treatable, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But it’s currently only recommended for those with an increased risk for lung cancer because of smoking for many years. (If you’d like to be screened for lung cancer, speak to your doctor, the CDC advises.)

That’s why women with lung cancer who weren’t eligible for screening are advocating for the current screening guidelines to change. Recent research found that universal screening beginning at 40 years old, regardless of smoking history, could detect 93.9% of lung cancers, up from 35.1% under current standards.

Boehler has made her case to federal health institutions to expand the guidelines for screenings and to insurance companies to cover the costs. She feels strongly that these changes will save lives and spare patients high medical costs for treatments they could have avoided with early detection.

“This isn’t (only) a smoker’s disease,” says Boehler. “We have to change the narrative.”

As she awaits publication of her book and her the launch of her lung cancer nonprofit, Boehler’s doctors test her blood and regularly scan her lungs. So far, they’ve found no evidence of disease.