By Linda Campbell
lcampbell@star-telegram.com
It took complications from prostate cancer surgery for Charles Florsheim to discover he had lung cancer.
A chest X-ray before a second operation showed a "vague density" that turned out to be the disease that kills more Americans than the three other leading cancers combined.
"It came as a complete shock," Florsheim said, sitting in his downtown Fort Worth law office 18 months after surgery to remove the upper and middle lobes of his right lung.
He wanted to just walk away from the disease, he said. But his oncologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center drew him into the National Lung Cancer Partnership. Now, Florsheim's promoting education about lung cancer and efforts to raise money for woefully underfunded research.
He joined a dedicated group of North Texas women who through the partnership have organized a 5K run/walk for lung cancer awareness May 21 at the Oak Point Park & Nature Preserve in Plano.
The event is the first Texas run/walk in a nationwide "Free to Breathe" series launched in 2008.
"We hope to have a large turnout of people who care about this cause and getting lung cancer the funds it deserves," said Misty Dawn Shields, a UT Southwestern Ph.D. student who's media captain for the event.
"The stigma around lung cancer needs to be diminished, and awareness and education through events like ours will help make this happen."
Shields, an Addison resident who plans to attend medical school, lost her father to lung cancer when she was 15. He had been diagnosed at age 48.
"I remember looking at the oncologists who gave my father the opportunity to live nearly two extra years, and I found myself amazed at all of the graces in my life," she said in an e-mail exchange. "Hope brought my life clarity and insight into how I can give back to those in need, as both a doctor of philosophy and medicine."
It was Florsheim's oncologist, Dr. Joan Schiller at UT Southwestern in Dallas, who also got Shields involved in the National Lung Cancer Partnership, a nonprofit formed in 2001.
Susan Swanson said she joined the group at Schiller's invitation, too, after her best friend died from lung cancer in 2010. That friend, a nonsmoker and mother of a 1-year-old, was diagnosed just after her 42nd birthday.
"At her bedside, I promised her that I would do everything I could to get a Free to Breathe race started in Dallas," said Swanson, an ophthalmologist who co-chairs the local partnership chapter.
The facts about lung cancer are hideous.
It kills about 160,000 people in the United States annually, more than breast, colon and prostate cancers combined.
About 219,000 people a year will be diagnosed with the disease in the U.S., and only 15 percent will live more than five years.
There's no routine screening test available that celebrities can promote, so the disease typically isn't found until it has spread to other parts of the body.
Some 10 to 15 percent of lung cancer patients -- 20,000 to 30,000 people -- have never smoked; 60 percent of them women. And why most of them developed it is anybody's guess.
Yet the search for lung cancer's causes and treatments is the least-funded among the major cancers, according to the partnership: In 2009, research spending by the National Cancer Institute and Department of Defense per death was $1,675 for lung cancer (159,390 deaths); $5,292 for colorectal cancer (49,920 deaths); $18,658 for breast cancer (40,170 deaths); and $13,666 for prostate cancer (27,360 deaths).
Florsheim, who heads the corporate securities section at Cantey Hanger, said research funding is crucial for finding causes and developing early detection tools. With a 28-year-old daughter, he said, "I would like to know, is it caused genetically?"
Years of admirably aggressive fundraising has propelled breast cancer research that has, in turn, improved survival rates, so there are more advocates raising more dollars. Lung cancer needs that kind of virtuous cycle, too.
I plan to run May 21 for my younger sister, a nonsmoker who last week celebrated her third birthday since being diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer. I want her to celebrate many more.
For more on the Free to Breathe Run/Walk, go to
freetobreathe.com/register.html.
Linda P. Campbell is a Star-Telegram editorial writer.817-390-7867
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