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Fighting for Life: 26-Year-Old Woman Who Never Smoked Battles Rapidly Spreading Lung Cancer

Posted on: Sunday, 26 March 2006, 15:00 CST

By Heather Lalley, The Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Wash.

Mar. 26--Not long ago, Christine Plank-Meeusen bought a 16th birthday card for her son.

The boy, who adores dinosaurs and monster trucks, turns 4 in October.

But his mother doesn't take for granted she'll be alive to see Avery in 12 years, or even 12 months.

At just 26, the Spokane woman has battled lung cancer for nearly two years. She never smoked and never had much exposure to secondhand smoke. Doctors believe her to be the youngest person in the country living with the disease.

Despite aggressive treatment, cancer has leeched into her bones, liver, spleen and lymph nodes. And, earlier this month, on her husband's birthday, she learned she had lesions in her brain.

"Right after I get bad news, the next week or two is really rough," Plank-Meeusen says from the living room of the toy-filled North Side apartment she shares with Avery and her husband, Mathew Meeusen.

Bad news came again earlier this month with word of the death of Dana Reeve. Reeve, widow of paralyzed actor Christopher Reeve, died of lung cancer just seven months after announcing she had the disease. She was 44. And, like Plank-Meeusen, she had never smoked.

"That was incredibly devastating for me," she says.

Smoking, without a doubt, is the No. 1 cause of lung cancer. Tobacco is linked to about 80 percent of all cases. But that leaves tens of thousands of cancer patients for whom cigarettes are not a factor. About 30,000 Americans â€" a little less than the population of Coeur d'Alene â€" will die each year of lung cancer unrelated to smoking.

Researchers are not yet sure why nonsmokers get lung cancer. In some cases, there's a link to other carcinogens such as radon, asbestos or air pollution.

Since female nonsmokers are more likely to contract the disease, there's some thought that estrogen might increase lung cancer risk.

And there's a growing field of research into the genetic factors behind these cases.

"We are pretty much confident there is a genetic mechanism," says Plank-Meeusen's doctor, Steve Anthony, a hematologist and medical oncologist with Cancer Care Northwest. "Trying to find a specific genetic disorder in a small subset of patients is like trying to find a needle in a haystack."

Anthony recently sent pieces of Plank-Meeusen's tumor to an Arizona company, the Molecular Profiling Institute. The cutting-edge lab analyzed the cancer down to its genetic parts and produced a list of four drugs proven to be particularly effective on her specific tumor.

She started taking the first of those drugs about a week ago. She'll have to wait two months to undergo scans to see if Tarceva, a drug targeted to slow tumor-cell growth, has done its job.

Avery was just about a year old when Plank-Meeusen started coughing. It was a nasty cough that brought up yellowish phlegm from her chest.

After a month of that, she went to the doctor.

"I just figured maybe it was a stubborn cold or pneumonia," she says.

Antibiotics didn't work. Neither did an inhaler. Or steroids. Or nebulizer treatments. A tuberculosis test turned up negative.

After nine months of coughing, she got a chest X-ray â€" a simple test she now wishes she would've insisted upon much sooner.

"Even after they saw the mass, I still thought maybe it was pneumonia," she says.

But tissue samples from a bronchoscopy were definitive. It was cancer. She was 24.

In September 2004, she had surgery to remove the 3-inch tumor in her lung, followed by five months of chemotherapy. The family's hopes were high in the early part of last year. For several months, Plank-Meeusen was cancer-free.

But then tests showed tumors returned to her lymph nodes.

She started on a Mayo Clinic trial vaccine, designed to enlist her immune system in the war on the cancer cells. After five months, though, the cancer had won. She now had tumors in her bones, liver and more lymph nodes.

When that news came, Mathew Meeusen, 43, quit his job as St. Vincent de Paul's operating director to take more flexible work as a sales rep.

His wife started on new, tougher chemotherapy coupled with radiation to her chest and neck.

The treatment nearly killed her. Radiation seared her throat, leaving her unable to eat or drink. ("Like strep throat times 10," she says.) She spent her birthday and Valentine's Day in the hospital, being fed through an IV.

And then, just over two weeks ago, on her husband's birthday, she learned about the 10 cancerous lesions in her brain.

"I told my wife it wasn't the gift I wanted," Meeusen says dryly.

Even after all she'd been through, the latest news was almost more than she could bear.

"I had cancer in all these other places," she says, wearing a bright, tie-dyed head scarf. "Then you think, 'the brain.' That, just for me, was almost like the last straw."

So, she's been buying the birthday cards for Avery. And Mathew snaps pictures and takes video of the two of them together.

"You can tell someone what I looked like," she says. "You can't explain somebody's laugh."

Since her diagnosis, Plank-Meeusen worked to help pass Washington's tough anti-smoking law, hanging up signs in support of the initiative around town. She hopes to get the chance to lobby the governor to spend some of the state's tobacco settlement money on lung cancer research.

Treatments, at this point, are about buying time â€" quality time â€" that Plank-Meeusen can spend doing things with her husband and son.

"What we've learned in oncology is the majority of diseases we deal with are incurable," Anthony says. "If I can improve a patient's quality of life with treatment, then it's still worthwhile to treat."

Plank-Meeusen and her husband celebrated their sixth anniversary last week. He took her to a radiation treatment that day while her mom watched Avery.

The couple met online and she moved to Spokane from Ontario, Canada, in 1999. Meeusen's mother died shortly before their wedding. So they set aside plans for a big ceremony and instead got married at the Hitching Post in Coeur d'Alene.

They always planned on having their big wedding some day.

Before cancer and daily doctor's appointments and treatments and bad news became their life, the couple â€" like all couples â€" had big plans.

They would've bought a house by now, instead of staying in the cramped apartment.

They would've traveled. To Meeusen's home state of Alaska. To Disneyland.

They would've had a sister or brother for Avery. Plank-Meeusen had already bought some girl clothes. The couple even picked out a name: Ashland Brianna Rose.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Wash.

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Source: The Spokesman-Review

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