Lung cancer patient shares urgent warning after being diagnosed at 28 over symptom she ignored

One young lung cancer patient is tackling the disease’s connotations as the non-smoker cautions others of early warning signs she dismissed. Aurora Lucas was diagnosed with stage 3A lung cancer in December 2021 when she was just 28 years old after suffering from symptoms for nearly four months.

Detailing her journey, and devotedly answering questions from her loyal following on TikTok, the now 31-year-old revealed it all started with simple chest pains. Although the ache right above her heart was painful enough that she believed “I was having a stroke” she brushed it off initially, putting it down to stress.

Aurora shared: “I had just gotten a new house and I was about to begin teaching a new school year. It was just so many things going on at once.” Unfortunately, the teacher put many other symptoms down to stress as well while her health gradually deteriorated.

She then developed a “baby cough” but felt her “throat was just itchy” despite it lasting for weeks. When she started to develop severe back pain alongside her chest pain, Aurora thought her shoes were to blame, being on her feet at work all day or maybe her bed wasn’t supportive enough.

The last major symptom she warned viewers became so debilitating her husband had to start picking her up from work as she didn’t trust herself to drive home every day. She shared: “It was extreme fatigue. I would go to work around 7 am, and be released from school around 3 pm by that time I was wiped out, I was exhausted.

“I would try to drive home the first couple of weeks and I almost fell asleep at the wheel. Those were huge signs that I thought were just stress.” However, the cancer survivor noted that the symptoms vary for each individual.

Aurora’s case is a medical anomaly as only 1.4 percent of all people with lung cancer are under the age of 35. However, globally there is an increase in early-onset cancers with the number of diagnosed patients under the age of 50 rising by 79 percent between 1990 and 2019 according to the journal BMJ Oncology.

The numbers, as well as Aurora’s non-smoking history, did take a toll on her medical journey as she revealed in another clip: “It took me about three months to get diagnosed just because doctors over and over again were doing everything else and suspecting everything else.

“They thought it might be tuberculosis, they thought it might be an infection, I got a diagnosis for my heart. I just think about the time…Would I have been diagnosed at an earlier stage?” She shared a sympathetic message for other young lung cancer patients and urged people, in general, to reconsider their approach to lung cancer as a whole.

She passionately explained that whenever she mentions to someone new that she has lung cancer she is faced with a single question: “Did you smoke?” Aurora answered: “I didn’t but I think we have to reframe our question because nobody deserves to have lung cancer whether they had smoked or not. There’s so many of us out there that don’t know why we have this disease.”