by Barbara Nevins Taylor

You may have seen the ads for lung cancer screening and thought about it, or not. I’m here to tell you, it’s a good idea. Screening saved my life once and I hope that a recent CT scan, which revealed a cancerous tumor, will help me live a little longer.

I’m scheduled for surgery and am optimistic that the thoracic surgeon, Andrew Kaufman at Mount Sinai Medical Center, will successfully remove the newest discovery in my right lung. He is a second timer with me. In 2018, I volunteered for a study, at Montefiore-Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and agreed to have a scan of my heart. Two days later, the doctor Ana Bortnick called and said, “I have some information for you. The scan showed that you have what radiologists call ground glass in your lungs. It’s a good idea to check with your primary doctor and a pulmonologist.”

Ground glass rang a bell with me. The term connected to 9/11 first responders who had been diagnosed with lung cancer. Ground glass – a reference to what the image looks like in the scan — was found in their lungs before cancer was confirmed. I wasn’t heroic like them, but I was a TV reporter and had raced to the World Trade Center minutes after the first terrorist-driven plane slammed into North Tower.

We live in Greenwich Village, and our house shook when the plane flew low over it heading directly south. Seconds later, neighbors saw the crash and from street level we all saw the flames spurting from the building. I had to go. My husband, Nick Taylor, came with me, and we walked against the human tide moving quickly up Varick Street trying to get away. I pounded my analog phone over and over fruitlessly trying to reach the assignment desk to let them know I was ready to report.

When we got to the towers, it was chaos. People crying. People running. People trying to help. We stood under the North Tower staring up watching the flames, stunned, frustrated, unable to do anything useful. Some on the top floors waved white somethings from broken windows, begging for rescue. Men and women driven by the flames plummeted from those high floors. Some of them held hands.  

After a few minutes, a long-screeching creaking sound gained strength against noise of sirens and tumult. It got louder and louder. A man standing next to us — an NYPD detective who like us had come when he saw the flames — heard the creaking and yelled, “She’s coming down. Run.” We ran north as the South Tower fell into itself and sent a volcano of toxic debris sprinkling down upon the neighborhood.  It was weirdly pretty; what we saw through the smoke were dancing strips of paper falling in the morning breeze. 

Unable to stand still, I went looking for a phone. I banged on the glass window, and a manager at a nearby McDonald’s let me use his fax phone to reach my office. The assistant news director told me a crew was waiting a few blocks away and I would be the first reporter live. I spent the day interviewing survivors and others looking for loved ones. The next week, and for many weeks after, I visited sites near the collapsed towers interviewing, reporting, and breathing the smokey toxic air. That’s why I wasn’t surprised when the cancer in my lung was officially linked to 9/11 by the World Trade Center Health Registry at NYU and in Washington, D.C.

After the first surgery, CT scans became an official part of my life. Every six months, I made the trip to the radiology department, waited my turn to slide into the machine, and then waited anxiously for the results in the doctor’s office.

All was good, until it wasn’t. That brings me back to screening. Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death, according to the American Cancer Society. It is generally symptomless in the initial stage. Just like it was for me.  But the good news is that patients diagnosed by CT scans have a 20-year survival rate of 81%. Even better, there was a 95% survival rate if the cancer was found in the early stages, according to an international study led by Claudia Henschke, professor of radiology and director of the Early Lung and Cardiac Action Program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center. Although I’ve never met her, my case and my scans are part of the study and continue in studies conducted by Henschke and her team.

Henschke, and the first scan and the surgeon helped me lead a healthy life for five and half years longer than I might have. Now I hope that the latest scan will keep me in that 95% survival group.