Woman, 42, Reveals 1st Signs of Lung Cancer That Doctors Dismissed

In August of 2024, Jessie Creel was participating in a friendly local swimming competition near her home in San Clemente, California.

And when she came in second place, she was shocked.

A lifelong athlete and self-described “competitive a–hole,” Creel was surprised — not just because she didn’t win, but because she felt so physically awful. During the beach runs, she felt like she couldn’t breathe, and swimming made her feel as if she “almost drowned.”

But it wasn’t entirely out of the blue. Creel had developed a cough and had been mysteriously losing weight. One time, while camping, she even coughed up “a huge blood clot.” Creel, who works as a film and television producer, had been “kicked off my own set” for disruptive coughing that summer, she says.

Creel went to her doctor several times throughout the spring and summer, and was diagnosed with various ailments. Most recently, she’d been told she had walking pneumonia, and by the time of the swimming competition, Creel was on her third round of antibiotics, plus steroids and an inhaler.

“I was told multiple times it’s allergies, it’s the stress of having a career and three kids. There’s no way that it could be anything bad because I don’t even drink alcohol. I’ve never smoked. I’m an athlete. I’ve never been overweight,” Creel recalls.

“In the back of my mind, I was like, ‘No, there’s something really wrong with me,'” she says. “I just knew it.”

A gum graft surgery left her “coughing so much that I was coughing up sutures from the surgery,” she says. And she wasn’t sleeping. “I couldn’t lean on the right or it felt like an elephant was sitting on my chest,” she says, “and if I laid flat on my back, I coughed to a point where the whole house was up.”

Creel had to fight to see a pulmonologist who would take her seriously. But, finally, in November of 2024 at age 42, Creel learned that she had Stage 4 lung cancer.

Once Diagnosed, Creel’s Treatment Moved Quickly

It took only six days from meeting with her pulmonologist to being diagnosed with Stage 4 non-small cell lung cancer, which had already spread to her bones, brain and lymph nodes.

But her oncologist did share a bit of good news: Creel’s cancer had a genetic mutation affecting a protein called the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), which could be targeted by certain drugs. And in early December, she began that targeted therapy.

Two weeks later, she needed another CT scan, and the doctors could already see that the drug was working. “Within two weeks, my tumors in my lungs had already shrunk by a third,” she recalls.

By January 2025, Creel also started a chemotherapy regimen. Friends who’d had breast cancer told her the chemo would be “awful,” she recalls. “But what I noticed was my lung cancer symptoms were resolving as I was doing the chemo,” Creel says. “So, yeah, I threw up. But I could breathe again.”

Being able to track those improvements “gave me a little skip in my step,” she says.

A Challenging, Delicate Surgery

Once Creel finished chemotherapy, she made the journey to see Dr. John Heymach, chair of thoracic/head and neck medical oncology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Heymach took a look at her case and decided she was a good candidate for local consolidative therapy, an approach that aims to remove as much affected tissue as possible after a patient’s initial treatment to prevent the disease from progressing.

“Historically, if somebody’s lung cancer has spread to multiple spots, it’s considered incurable,” Heymach tells TODAY.com.

In those cases, “doctors have not pursued aggressive strategies like trying to cut out the tumors or radiate the residual tumors,” he says, “because the thought had been that the cancer had spread, and what you were seeing was just the tip of the iceberg.”

But Heymach and his colleagues had seen in a few studies that, in the right patient and under the right circumstances, there was a benefit to pursuing a more aggressive strategy.

In Creel’s case, that meant a challenging, seven-hour surgery to remove the upper right lobe of her lung and her primary tumor performed by Dr. Mara Antonoff, a cardiothoracic surgeon specializing in advanced lung cancer cases at MD Anderson.

“Four hours in, they hadn’t even gotten to the lungs. That’s how meticulous she was,” Creel recalls. In addition to the lung resection, Creel also had nine lymph nodes removed. “It was a major surgery. I have a scar that’s probably eight inches across my back,” she says.

But, after surgery, Creel was left with no active disease in her body.

As the Demographics of Lung Cancer Change, Treatment and Screening Evolve

Today, Creel is doing well. “This is me now with no evidence of active disease and much healthier this year than last,” she says.

A new report from the American Cancer Society estimates that, in 2026, lung cancer will cause more deaths than any other type of cancer. While the vast majority of lung cancer cases are attributed to smoking, recent studies have shown a worrying rise in cases among young adults and people who have never smoked.

Once thought of as only a “smoker’s disease,” Heymach explains, lung cancer is increasingly affecting nonsmokers, women and younger patients.

“The face of lung cancer is changing,” Heymach says, noting that lung cancer in a smoker is “very different” from the lung cancer affecting nonsmokers. “They have different genes that are turned on and different ways to treat them,” he explains. “The biology of the disease is changing, and our treatment strategies have to adapt to that as well.”

Creel is an example of those evolving demographics — and the way different treatment approaches can now be tailored to individual patients.

Lung cancer often does not come with noticeable symptoms, TODAY.com explained previously. And by the time those symptoms do appear, like Creel’s cough, the disease is typically already in its later stages.

Even without symptoms, people as young as 50 may qualify for lung cancer screening based on their current or previous smoking habits. But many people who are eligible do not take advantage of that screening.

And, considering that patients younger than 50 are increasingly being diagnosed with lung cancer (often in later stages), there is a movement to widen the eligibility criteria and possibly lower that initial screening age, NBC News reported recently.

Recent research suggests the current screening guidelines only detect 35% of those with lung cancer, and that expanding to universal criteria — making everyone ages 40 to 85 eligible, regardless of their smoking history — could catch 94% of cancers.

Creel hopes her story can be an argument for more access to screening, including for nonsmokers, as well as the need to advocate for yourself to get the care you deserve. She’s now hoping to enroll in a clinical trial that Heymach is participating in to investigate a potential cancer vaccine.

She’s still in frequent contact with many of her doctors, calling it a “really big, happy, collaborative family,” and joking that she’s going to haunt them if she dies.

“We’re going to beat this or I’m going to die trying,” she says. “I have three kids that I’m madly in love with. I have a career I love, I have a husband I love, I have a life I love, and I’d like to be here as long as possible.”