What A Lung Cancer Survivor Can Teach Us About Lung Cancer Survival

Despite an uncountable number of modern medical innovations, lung cancer still remains a lethal disease. Lung cancer is the second most common cause of death in the United States and in many other industrialized countries. It is the leading cause of cancer death.

Only about half of the people who have any form of lung cancer live for more than a year after their diagnosis. About three-fourths of men and women who are diagnosed with any form of lung cancer will die within two years of learning about the cancer. And only 2 percent of people who are diagnosed with lung cancer manage to live longer than 5 years.

Dr. Carl O. Helvie, however, not only has survived, at the time this article is being written, 39 years after his diagnosis of lung cancer, he continues to lead an active life at the age of 80.

Dr. Helvie continues to be a nurse practitioner, an author, a researcher, a radio personality, and a a cancer educator, and he doesn't even take any medications. Like many cancer survivors, Dr. Helvie had an inspirational mother.

A Mother's Inspiration

Dr. Helvie wasn't the first member of his family to get a cancer diagnosis. Over 60 years ago, Helvie's mother had been diagnosed with the disease and told she would never leave the hospital. Like more than one mother of minor children, Helvie's mother wasn't going to take the diagnosis lying down.

She "had three children at home and had to make sure they graduated from high school," Helvie recounts. There wasn't reason to have faith in medicine, but she had faith in God, and she had a list of things she needed to accomplish. In an era when almost no one survived any kind of cancer, Mrs. Helvie beat the odds.

Searching for God

When Helvie himself was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1974, the condition was still considered to be a death sentence. But Helvie remembered his mother's fatith and joined a "Search for God" group as he battled lung cancer. He prayed. He meditated. And he looked for a physician who could use techniques that spared healthy cells while killing cancerous cells.

Helvie also made sense of what was happening to him. When a friend asked him why, he thought, he had cancer, he responded that it was a gift" in order to now offer help and encouragements to others faced with the same diagnosis." And with the help of Dr. Kim Dalzell, Dr. Bernie Siegel, Dr. Francisco Contrerase, and Tanya Harter Pierce, that is precisely what he continues to do.