After a car accident in 2016, Yovanna Portillo, then 34, visited the emergency room as a precaution. Doctors diagnosed her with whiplash from the collision. But one of the scans she underwent detected a mass on her lungs, and doctors urged her to follow up with her primary care physician. A few months later, she learned the mass was Stage 1 lung cancer.
“I thought there would be a gazillion other illnesses that I might have to encounter in my future,” the now 43-year-old from Florida tells TODAY.com. “Lung cancer was not anywhere on that list.”
Unexpected diagnosis after an accident
After the car accident, Portillo called her doctor and told him, “‘Hey I was in a car accident over the weekend. Got the works done. No broken bones. Just fat tissue damage. But there is something they found on my lungs. They told me to follow up,’” she recalls. Her doctor recommended she visit a pulmonologist. At the time, Portillo lived in Arizona, where Valley fever, a lung condition caused by a fungal infection, can occur. The doctor tested her for that, which was negative. But the pulmonologist could not perform a bronchoscopy to better examine the mass because of its location.
While the doctor recommended a follow-up with a thoracic surgeon, she also ordered a PET scan and had Portillo undergo a lung capacity test. The thoracic surgeon performed a CT-guided biopsy, which uses a CT scan to find tissue samples, to determine what the mass was. Soon after, Portillo learned she had cancer.
“Surgery was recommended, and I like to take my time and think things through, and so I asked the surgeon, ‘How much time to I have to process this, think about and decide my plan of action?’” Portillo says. “And she said, ‘Take a month. Take two. Don’t take more than three. We don’t know how aggressive this cancer is.’”
The surgeon also recommended Portillo seek a second opinion if that would ease her mind. That made Portillo feel comfortable with her, so she scheduled surgery for two weeks later. Still, Portillo faced some tough thoughts about having lung cancer as a non-smoker.
“I was shocked,” she says. “I never smoked. I followed the rules. … Out of all the diseases, I end up with lung cancer.”
Portillo’s surgeon removed her lower lobe of her left lung, the only location where they found cancer. Doctors diagnosed her as Stage 1 and the surgery removed it entirely. Portillo met with an oncologist afterward to discuss whether she needed chemotherapy. At the time, Portillo worried about it impacting her future fertility. Because of the early diagnosis, the doctor believed that she could skip follow-up treatment and undergo surveillance with regular scans.
“He said he thought it would be more harmful than beneficial for me to receive any additional therapy,” she says.
Lung cancer in non-smokers
Lung cancer in non-smokers is increasing “on a relative basis,” as the number of people who smoke has decreased, says Dr. William Dahut, chief scientific officer at the American Cancer Society.
“Most of lung cancer is driven by tobacco use,” he tells TODAY.com. But “we certainly can’t ignore lung cancer in non-smokers.”
For the first time, the number of women under 65 with lung cancer has eclipsed the rates of men with it, according to the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Statistics 2025.
“We are seeing definitely trends to greater number of young women who are being diagnosed than men certainly not men and certainly not related to smoking,” Dahut says.
It’s unclear why more non-smoking women are developing lung cancer, he says, noting that there could be an underlying genetic reason for some.
Symptoms of lung cancer remain the same, no matter the cause. Those signs include:
- A persistent cough
- Coughing up blood
- Shortness of breath
- Chest pain that intensifies with deep breathing, coughing or laughing
- Unexplained weight loss
- Hoarse voice
- Exhaustion or weakness
- Wheezing
- Frequent chest infections such as bronchitis and pneumonia
Often symptoms don’t develop until the cancer is advanced, Dahut says. Even if signs exist in young healthy women, they might be dismissed as doctors often do not consider lung cancer as a diagnosis.
“Particularly in young healthy women, symptoms are ignored and sadly there’s a delay and diagnosis,” Dahut says. “Cancer, at that point, can be much more advanced and more difficult to treat.”
Frequently, doctors find lung cancer accidentally, much like how Portillo was diagnosed.
“It’s actually not uncommon that lung cancer is diagnosed for CT scans that are not done for complaints of shortness of breath or any sort of pulmonary complaint,” Dahut explains. “If you go in and you have abdominal pain and then worry you have appendicitis, oftentimes the CT scan will go up in your lungs.”
Dahut says the taboo associated with lung cancer can be a reason why many people experience delayed diagnosis.
“Even in non-smokers, some of the sigma has also carried over to them in a way that’s not’s really relevant. … If you have lung cancer you should be treated, you should get good care,” he says. “There is this stigma about it that it’s your fault.”
This has likely led to less funding for lung cancer research and “probably made it more difficult for interactions with health care providers,” Dahut says. Still, he is “optimistic” that things will change especially as more data emerges.
“We’re hearing more stories about lung cancer in the young, lung cancer in non-smokers, and we also have a lot of success in targeted therapies for lung cancer,” he says. “I do see more dollars going into lung cancer than in past years.”
Current treatments include surgery, chemotherapy, radiation and targeted therapy for those who have a cancer with a biomarker. Doctors have good success in treating early-stage lung cancer, so quick detection is key to a good prognosis. Screening is recommended for smokers, but very few people are aware or follow through with such recommendations.
“There’s no routine screening done in this country except for folks that have had long histories of tobacco use,” he says. “The rates are abysmal. We often see 13-15% screening rates as compared to 60-80% with colorectal or breast cancer.”
‘Change the perception of lung cancer’
Prior to her lung cancer diagnosis, Portillo was training for her third half marathon. Soon after surgery, she began running again and experienced some pain.
“I went to see my oncologist, and I was like, ‘My lung, it’s really sore,’” she says. “They’re like, ‘What are you doing? And I was like, ‘I started training for my half marathon, and they’re like, ‘What are you doing?!’”
As a compromise, her doctors agreed to allow her to walk it. Portillo struggled with resting as part of her recovery and felt grateful that about a year after surgery, she could engage in all physical activities again, though it took some patience.
“I started hiking, getting back on the mountains,” she says. “I had to learn to give myself grace.”
Since then, she’s completed two full marathons.
It’s been eight years since Portillo learned she had lung cancer, and she has been cancer-free since surgery. Soon after her diagnosis, she started raising awareness and dispelling myths about lung cancer.
“Dr. Google told me that the five-year survival rate was very low, so I didn’t even think I was going to make it to 40,” she says. “I had read the statistics (that were) dated.”
She also learned that lung cancer carries a “stigma” that only smokers receive that diagnosis.
“I use my story and my experience to change the perception of lung cancer and to raise awareness that it’s really a cancer that can affect anyone,” she says. “It was random luck that rogue cells became cancerous in my lungs.”
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