Surgeons often take a fifth of the lungs to remove a small tumor. There may be a better way.
Claudia Donohue was on the operating table first thing in the morning. It wasn’t where she wanted to end up when she first learned she had lung cancer. When she saw the constellation of white dots on her chest scan, she figured the last 59 years of smoking cigarettes had finally caught up to her. Plus, she’d already had cancer once before, in her bladder. It seemed to her that the odds at her age, 76, weren’t good.
“I just felt if I had lung cancer, it was probably terminal, and I wasn’t very positive about surgery and recovering for it,” Donohue said. But Ankit Bharat, her doctor and the chief of thoracic surgery at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, breezily told her not to worry. His department, he said, had a new surgical program for early-stage lung cancers that could remove less of her lung, improve her chances, and get her back on her feet quickly. That caught Donohue’s attention.
