As a mother to two boys under 6, Heather Quintana Suchan found it easy to explain away the persistent cough she’d been dealing with throughout 2023. They must have brought home some sort of illness from school, transmitted through uncovered sneezes and scarce handwashing.
At her office, she did something similar. She’d moved to a new space with different light bulbs, and her new computer monitor must have been smaller than the one she used before, which could explain her new sensitivity to light and vision changes. But in December, when her cough began to sound wet, she suspected it might be more serious. “I had pneumonia,” she remembers thinking at the time.
In February 2024, urgent care physicians gave her antibiotics to treat what appeared to be lung congestion in her X-rays. When the suspected respiratory infection didn’t clear up after a few days, she followed their advice to see a pulmonologist.
It was probably Valley fever or a fungal infection, the pulmonologist said.
“Nobody was really worried about anything being seriously wrong with me at that point, and so they also offered me another course of antibiotics,” Suchan, now 41, tells TODAY.com.
“But they said if I really wanted to know what was going on in my lungs … that I would need to get a bronchoscopy.” Done with all the guesswork, she opted to undergo the procedure, which uses a tube to look inside the lungs and airways.
Before being sedated, Suchan requested one thing from her doctor: to tell her immediately if it’s cancer. It was.
A New Plan
Suchan was young and healthy otherwise. She could probably get this newfound lung cancer treated with surgery, doctors told her. “So, even then, I was pretty optimistic that it, you know, it may or may not be a big deal at that point,” she says.
A few Sundays later, Suchan’s the results of her positron emission tomography (PET) scan, imaging that can determine whether cancer has spread, appeared in her online medical chart. She reviewed them alone at home. “They said I had cancer in my lungs, in my lymph nodes, in my liver, in my bones, and I could not believe what I was reading at that point,” Suchan recalls.
She tried calling the emergency line to reach her oncologist, but they weren’t available. Then, on Monday, she was told her doctor would be on vacation for the next two weeks.
If her doctor wasn’t available, Suchan was going to find one who was. She called friends and people in her work network, shared the news and asked for referrals. Soon, her boss connected her with Dr. Ravi Salgia, an oncologist at City of Hope in Los Angeles. “I’ve been in his care to this day,” says Suchan, “and I’m receiving excellent care.”
‘But I’m Young’
The profile for lung cancer patients is evolving. It’s no longer a smoker’s disease, nor does it spare youth. Suchan was in her 30s; she’d never smoked and yet had Stage 4 non-small cell lung cancer. And she’s not an outlier.
While avoiding tobacco is important, 20% of people who die from lung cancer have never smoked, according to the American Cancer Society, and it’s the leading cause of cancer-related death, per the National Institutes of Health. Women younger than 54 are being diagnosed with the disease at higher rates than men in the same age range, the American Cancer Society adds.
Current screening guidelines don’t yet reflect this data, however. Annual screening is recommended only for those ages 50-80 who smoked a pack a day for 20 years or have quit in the past 15 years — neither of which apply to Suchan. An increasing number of lung cancer patients don’t meet these crieter, says Salgia, Suchan’s doctor, tells TODAY.com.
So, he reminds each of his patients that “they’re not a statistic; they’re an individual,” and he’s going to treat them as such.
He evaluated Suchan’s cancer for unique characteristics. Looking at it under the microscope, Salgia found that her cancer had a type of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutation that was ideal for a new formulation of a popular drug.
A Treatment Change
How Suchan would proceed with treatment was up to her. “(My medical team) did tell me, ‘We’ll drive as hard as you want to drive.’ I said I wanted to drive hard. I have two children and a husband. I will do whatever it takes to get through this,” says Suchan.
They “threw the whole kitchen sink at this thing,” she adds.
Suchan’s treatment was three-pronged. She underwent six sessions of carboplatin, a type of chemotherapy, every four weeks. After that, in October 2024, she started pemetrexed, another chemo drug, and then she started amivantamab, a targeted therapy, which she received via IV infusion.
For a year and a half, Suchan sat for treatment between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. “As a working mother, I was really wanting to pick up my kids from school or afterschool care, and I found myself sometimes coming in really hot to pick them up,” she recalls.
Then, the FDA approved a subcutaneous version of amivantamab, and she was able to receive treatment via injection, which only required an hour or two of her time.
City of Hope had the treatment quickly approved for use, Salgia explains, and Suchan was able to reduce her treatment time, and she experienced fewer side effects. “So that was a big increase in my quality of life … being able to pick (my kids) up and hang out with them like it’s a normal day. Sometimes they don’t even know that I went to the hospital and received my medicine. So that’s been a huge improvement.”
Suchan’s not done yet. She’s just completed her 30th round of treatment with more to come. There is, however, no evidence of cancer progression. “If you look on some of my scans, the cancer in my liver is completely gone. The cancer in my bones is completely gone,” Suchan explains.
Returning to Work
As soon as she could, Suchan returned to her job as a merchandise designer at Universal Music Group, where she creates products for the likes of Billie Eilish, Blink-182 and Kacey Musgraves.
After taking six months off for treatment, “I wanted to come back and do more because, to me, I didn’t want cancer to define me, and I wanted to get back to doing what I loved,” Suchan says. At work, she knew she’d be surrounded by people who’d shown her compassion when she needed it most.
“I know this is going to sound weird, but …I kind of felt like I went to my own funeral when people found out that I had Stage 4 cancer,” says Suchan. People called to tell her how much they love her and how much she means to them. “But then I lived, and I felt like I got to hear all the nice stuff.”
“I came back feeling really loved out of all of it. I’m still here, and I don’t plan on going anywhere.”