Mother of 2 Thought She Had a ‘Very Bad Cold’ That Wouldn’t Go Away. Then Doctors Found ‘Cancer Everywhere’ (Exclusive)

NEED TO KNOW

• Heather Quintana was feeling under the weather for weeks

• After several doctor visits, they kept giving her antibiotics, but she wasn’t getting better

• When she finally got a CT scan, they found “cancer everywhere”

Toward the end of 2023, Heather Quintana started feeling a bit under the weather. She had a cough that simply wouldn’t go away, but didn’t think anything of it, since, as a mother of two, she was used to getting sick.

Around Christmas that year, she found herself constantly bringing lozenges around to help quell her cough. But still, her symptoms never subsided. Then, in February 2024, she became even more congested.

“I was having a very bad cold, and it became worse with extreme lung congestion and fatigue,” she tells PEOPLE. “I started to wheeze. I thought, ‘This cold really got worse. Maybe I have pneumonia.’ “

She went to urgent care, and they took an X-ray, noticing cloudiness in her lungs, agreeing it was likely pneumonia.

“They gave me a shot of antibiotics and steroids, and told me if I didn’t feel remarkably better to come back in a few days,” she recalls. “I was prescribed inhalers, and three days passed, and then I went back to urgent care because I didn’t get any better.”

Quintana, 43, still experienced the same symptoms, and the X-ray revealed no improvement in her lungs. So, the technician recommended that she consult a pulmonologist, a doctor who specializes in the respiratory system.

In late March, she scheduled a visit with her primary doctor and got a CT scan that showed nodules in her lungs.

Later that same week, she saw a pulmonologist and told him about her symptoms. He reviewed her CT scan and asked if she wanted to try a different medication or undergo a bronchoscopy to sample a nodule in her lungs and test it.

Quintana says she was “tired of guessing” and decided to get the bronchoscopy, a procedure that allows doctors to look at the lungs and air passages by inserting a thin tube through the nose or mouth.

“I go through the bronchoscopy, they pull the sample, I wake up and the doctor’s there,” she recalls. “He says it was cancerous.”

Still, they needed to get a better look at where the cancer was, so her doctor referred her to a local oncologist, who ordered a PET scan in April 2024.

“The results come in on a Sunday afternoon when there’s nobody to call. The PET scan results say that I have cancer in my lungs, I have cancer in my liver and I have cancer in my lymph nodes,” she shares. “I have cancer everywhere. I could not believe what I was reading.”

Quintana was scared and looking for answers. In a conversation with her husband, she told him to remarry if something were to happen to her.

“I said, ‘I have cancer and I have cancer everywhere.’ We had a good cry that day and freaked out. I assumed that I was done,” Quintana confesses, noting that her husband’s sister had died from breast cancer at 36.

“For me to tell my husband that I had cancer was the worst thing he could ever hear,” she says. “I took it as a motivator because I need to prove that this outcome can be different. I really set it as a goal with my husband, I said, ‘We’re gonna have a different outcome here. Don’t think I’m gonna end up the same.’ “

She tried calling her oncologist when she got her results, but was told her doctor was on vacation for the next two weeks.

“Instead of breaking down and crying, I said, ‘I need immediate help, and this is not the doctor for me,'” she shares. “I called my friends and colleagues and told them I had cancer. I work in the music industry, and many of the clients I work with are affiliated with cancer charities or cancer support groups. I called the people I knew who were helpers.”

It turned out that one of her coworkers had a connection at the local hospital, City of Hope, where she found care within a week through her connection.

Through a thoracic surgeon at City of Hope, Quintana was introduced to the head of lung oncology, Dr. Ravi Salgia. Dr. Salgia reviewed Quintana’s test results and discovered that she had a genetic mutation, which leads to uncontrolled cell growth. What seemed like lingering cold symptoms turned out to be Stage 4 EGFR-positive non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) — an advanced form of lung cancer that has spread to other parts of the body, which is noncurable, but treatable.

With this information, Dr. Salgia got to work.

“He said, ‘We’re gonna put you on a treatment plan and throw the whole kitchen sink at this thing. Are you with me?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I am with you,'” she recalls, noting that he put her on “a targeted therapy” that had recently been FDA-approved.

“He said, ‘You’re gonna be on Rybrevant, a targeted therapy. We’re also gonna give you pemetrexed, a lung chemo, and carboplatin, which is more of a general chemo that attacks everything,'” she says. “He said, ‘I want to be swift, and will drive as hard as you want to drive.’ I said, ‘Let’s drive.'”

Quintana also needed to undergo radiation “to clean up the cancer” in her bones, and started the very next week.

She stayed at the City of Hope for almost eight days, during which she walked around the radiation department and met the radiologist and the entire team.

“I felt very supported, and they cared so much about me. That day, they told me I have stage 4 lung cancer. That was impossible to hear. We all thought that meant that you were going to die,” she admits.

“Very quickly after speaking with City of Hope, they informed me that it’s no longer the case. That these cancers can be treated, you have to maintain it and stay on a regimen, and they can keep the cancer at bay and keep it away,” she adds.

Dr. Salgia advised her not to rely on “Dr. Google.” His focus was on treating her as an individual and patient, not as a statistic.

“The regimen ended up being that, first of all, they put radiation on my hip, my neck and my brain,” she shares. “It took about a week or two to hit all of those spots. Then they gave me a couple of weeks to rest. Then I started a regimen, which was six times a month of carboplatin, Rybrevant and pemetrexed.”

“I am on maintenance, they call it a maintenance treatment,” she adds. “I do that about once a month, every four weeks. I get scanned all the time, which I am grateful for. I want them to, to make sure that everything is good.”

Quintana says that, after the first six treatments, she “knew it worked.”

“The cancer kept shrinking and shrinking and shrinking and shrinking,” she tells PEOPLE.

Part of her advice to others echoes what her doctor told her, which is “don’t trust Dr. Google.”

“Find a healthcare provider that you feel comfortable with. You need to be able to trust your care team and know that they’re providing you with the best possible medication regimen. Don’t accept anything less.”

While still in continuous treatment, Quintana leans on the help of others and continues to share her story.

“That was something hard for me to explain to people, is that right now I can’t tie a neat little bow on this story that I’m cured and wave the flag of mission accomplished, but I can live a very normal life,” she says.

“I can continue to do that for decades and hope that as long as I hang in there, a cure could be found. I take it a day at a time.”

Read the original article on People