Originally Posted by soccertese

my brother's lung cancer - he died thursday
miserable way to go.
not looking for sympathy but thought sharing this might be educational.

i might be going overboard, but if you ever have a breathing problem, ask your doctor to consider lung cancer. if you never smoked and seem healthy they'll say don't worry. but my brother thought something was wrong, they diagnosed him with asthma and 4 months later he had stage4 lung cancer and had emergency brain surgery. they checked his lung capacity, it was normal but he was in great shape so his "normal" was greatly reduced from where it had been and masked his cancer. no chest xray, which might have found it early enough.
unfortunately, x-rays find a lot of false positives which makes doctors hesitant to give them during just a checkup but food for thought.