Margulies admits that she “never thought twice about it,” but her friends’ comments about the potentially hazardous chemicals that are used in dry-cleaning lingered in her mind. (About 85 percent of dry-cleaning shops in the United States use perchloroethylene, a liquid that is a potential occupational carcinogen, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.) Margulies began to worry, and eventually asked her doctor for a blood test, but because she wasn’t showing any symptoms, her doctor reassured her that everything was fine. A few months later, Margulies felt a pain in her chest. “I was concerned and said to my doctor, ‘I have this pain and now I’m connecting it with the chemicals. Do you think I have a problem? Do you think I should get it checked out?’” Her doctor, says Margulies, again reassured her that she was fine and advised her to consider seeing a therapist for her anxiety. Margulies recalls that she felt a bit better for a while, but she couldn’t shake the sense that something wasn’t right. “I had this nagging feeling [that] something is wrong in my body,” she recalls. “I called my doctor and said, ‘I know that you think I’m anxious — I am anxious,’” says Margulies. “I also feel very strongly that something is wrong, and you need to order me a chest X-ray.” The X-ray revealed that Margulies’ instincts were correct: There was a tumor in her lungs. Lung cancer is the most common type of cancer in the world, with as many as 2.1 million new cases diagnosed in 2018, according to the American Lung Association (ALA). And while the overall number of lung cancer cases has been declining in the past few decades in the United States, an estimated 582,631 Americans were living with lung and bronchus cancer in 2018, according to the National Cancer Institute. Although detecting the disease early on can dramatically improve rates of survival, that can be hard to do, in part because lung cancer doesn’t always cause symptoms in its initial stages, according to the ALA. Unless you’re at high risk for lung cancer (by smoking or working regularly with hazardous chemicals, such as arsenic or asbestos, for example) and are getting screened regularly, you may not notice anything amiss. For Margulies, the news, she says, was “horrifying,” but it was also the first step toward getting treatment. “I went through all the treatment and then on the last day of chemo, we rang a bell,” she says. “It was a big celebration, and then I was done.” Two months after returning to work, however, she felt a pain in her rib. “I had a bone scan and seven areas lit up, which were most likely metastasized cancer,” she says. Thankfully, her oncologist, a doctor who specializes in cancer treatment, provided the perspective and outlook she needed. “My doctor, who was amazing, said, ‘We got this; we can do something about this,’” says Margulies. Armed with this information and reassurance — that this wasn’t the end and that there was still a lot that could be done — she forged ahead in her lung cancer journey. This interview took place in February 2019.
