Patient stories.
Get real stories of people living with lung cancer.
Meet Camila.
Camila was diagnosed with KRAS G12V lung cancer at 25.
The hardest part was being believed.
I knew something wasn’t right. I just needed someone to believe me.
Camila woke up one morning in 2021 and coughed up a spoonful of bright red blood.
She was 22, recently finished her master's degree, and weeks away from starting medical school in Puerto Rico. COVID restrictions were just beginning to lift. Her whole life was about to begin.
Instead, it nearly ended.
"I instantly knew that wasn't normal," Camila recalls, her medical training already proving invaluable. But what followed was a year-long nightmare of dismissal, misdiagnosis, and medical gaslighting that would test every ounce of her resilience.
The fight for a diagnosis
Doctors thought Camila had pneumonia. They threw antibiotics at her, one after another. She even experienced hair loss. Nothing worked. The cough persisted. More blood came.
Her doctor finally agreed to a PET scan – but only after Camila fought for it. The scan lit up: A six-centimetre tumour sat in the upper lobe of her right lung, glowing unmistakably. Still, she was told it was probably pneumonia.
Camila knew better. “This isn’t normal,” she told him. “This is not pneumonia.”
She was referred to a surgeon who, too, believed cancer was almost impossible. “There’s a 99.9 percent chance this isn’t cancer,” he told her. “A 0.01 percent chance that it is.”
On 19 September 2022, Camila went into surgery expecting a biopsy.
The surgeon came out of the operating room crying. The tumour was adenocarcinoma – lung cancer. Sticky and aggressive, it had adhered to everything around it. Camila was 25.
While Camila was still unconscious from the surgery, the surgeon told her parents.
Camila's father fainted when he heard the news. It was so unexpected and uncommon that the news spread through the small Puerto Rican hospital like wildfire.
When Camila woke up in the ICU, tubes protruding from her chest, a morphine drip by her side, she knew immediately they'd found something terrible. But even then, she couldn't quite process it.
"I didn't cry," she says. "I was just shocked. Like my whole world came crashing down."
She was the oldest child, used to looking after everyone else. Now she found herself managing not only her own fear, but her parents’ devastation too. The emotional impact came later, in quieter moments, once the shock wore off and reality settled in.
When treatment becomes another battle
KNOW YOUR BIOMARKER
KRAS G12V
A less common subtype of a common lung cancer mutation—with no approved subtype-specific targeted therapies yet.
Three months later, Camila's oncologist called with more devastating news: the margins weren't clear. She needed another surgery. In December – just three months after her first thoracotomy (an open chest surgery) – surgeons opened the same incision again, this time removing her entire upper right lobe.
She spent Christmas Eve being discharged from the hospital, missing the celebrations that begin in November in Puerto Rico, watching everyone else enjoy life while stuck in a hospital bed.
"You still see the scar," Camila says quietly. "I felt butchered."
What came next was perhaps even more traumatic than the surgeries: her oncologist was withholding information, dismissed Camila's concerns and her first treatment failed.
Two weeks after surgery, Camila started her treatment: chemotherapy and immunotherapy.
Camila, armed with her medical background, pored over research papers and database studies, teaching herself about KRAS G12V – the rare adenocarcinoma mutation she carries. Her oncologist never explained it to her. In fact, Camila only discovered it by reading her own pathology reports.
"If I didn't know how to read the reports, I don't know what I would have done," she says. "My oncologist wasn’t straightforward about the treatments she’d chosen. In fact, she didn’t seem to be interested in helping me understand anything."
Unfortunately, the immunotherapy didn't work. In January 2024, Camila started coughing up blood – again.
Finding her voice
When Camila went to her oncologist reporting blood, the doctor suggested it was coming from her nose – anatomically impossible, as an ENT specialist would later confirm. The oncologist resisted ordering tests. She questioned why Camila would even want a bronchoscopy.
"She was really disrespectful," Camila recalls. "All I could think is that I now have a history of lung cancer. You should be suspicious."
That day became a turning point. Camila contacted a pulmonologist who cleared his schedule to see her immediately. He conducted the bronchoscopy, and connected her with a new oncologist who actually listened.
"It was like night and day," Camila says of her new care team. "I’ve felt that I can now focus on being a patient. I don't have to question every single decision."
The scans found progression – new tumours in her pleural lining and lymph nodes. What followed was harsher treatment. Radiation. Then aggressive chemotherapy (carboplatin and pemetrexed) combined with bevacizumab (Avastin).
This time, Camila lost everything: her hair, her eyebrows, her eyelashes. She gained weight. She bled constantly from her nose. Then she began bleeding vaginally, a rare side effect that landed her back in doctors’ offices, searching for yet another fix.
Through it all, she kept fighting.
System not equipped for young people with cancer
In the rush to save her life, no one had paused to consider the life she still wanted.
No one mentioned fertility before treatment began. No one had offered preservation options. “I always wanted to be a mom,” she said. “Now I don’t know if that’s possible.”
Today, Camila is 28. She is the youngest patient in her oncology clinic. The nurses call her “la nena” — the little girl. She has finished her latest round of treatment and is being monitored closely. She is alive. She is studying again. She is still planning a future, even if its shape has changed.
She tells her story openly, not because it is easy, but because she knows how silence nearly cost her everything. “If someone listens to what I’ve been through,” she said, “maybe they’ll fight harder. Maybe they won’t be dismissed.”
Living in the grey
Today, at 28, Camila lives what she calls "in between the shades of grey" – neither cancer-free nor defined by her disease.
She took the MCAT during chemotherapy and scored well. She's applying to medical school again. She reads voraciously, maintains her friendships, and refuses to let cancer steal her future, even as she waits for biopsy results that will determine her next treatment.
"I want treat this like a chronic illness," she explains. "You manage it. You take your medications. You continue."
One of the biggest challenges hasn't been the cancer itself, but the ableism and discrimination she faces from institutions that can't understand how someone can be both a cancer patient and a thriving young woman with ambitions.
"People expect cancer patients are just in bed all day," she says. "But I still have my life. I still want to keep living because death is guaranteed for everybody."
Her advice to other patients is fierce and hard-won: "Use your voice. Even if you don't have the medical degree, you know your body. You know what's going on. You have to speak up. And know that there is a solution. You have to keep pushing for yourself."
I had to be my own fiercest advocate. No one should have to do that alone.
The power of community
Camila credits her survival to her support system – her father, her "rock," who goes to every appointment; her mother; her brother studying pharmacy; cousins who are doctors; friends who send her research articles. Not every cancer patient has this support, and Camila knows it.
Camila is also finding her people – the other young adults navigating life with cancer, the ones who understand dark humour and who get it when no one else can.
And she's determined to be visible, to share her story, so that other young people facing the impossible might see themselves in her and know they're not alone.
Camila wanted to become a doctor to help people. Cancer interrupted that plan, but it did not erase it. She has already learned lessons medicine still struggles to teach: that patients are not statistics, that young does not mean immune, that listening can save lives.
“I had to be my own fiercest advocate,” she said. “No one should have to do that alone.”
April 2026