Woman recounts battle with lung cancer

Roughly six months after a Whitefish woman was given two weeks to live, she sat on her back porch and talked about the cancer that was trying to kill her.

Samantha Ray thought she had a rib out of place when she went in for a CT scan in January. It was her 46th birthday.

“I heard ‘stage 4 lung cancer’ and was shocked. I watched this kill my dad. But I don’t smoke, I never smoked,” Ray said. “I felt embarrassed to tell people the type of cancer I had. There’s stigma of, ‘Oh, you did this to yourself.’”

Ray’s career and lifestyle revolved around health.

Before her job became survival, she owned a yoga studio and worked as a health and wellness coach. For 15 years, she has eaten grass-fed beef and local vegetables. As a single mom to two teenage boys, she found gaps in each day to strength-train and meditate.

Even so, roughly a month after her diagnosis, Ray lay on her couch as a hospice worker monitored her medicine. With morphine running through her system, she watched blurs of her friends argue about whether she should risk out-of-state treatment or stay in Montana to die.

“It felt unfair — all cancer does — but I thought this cancer was something that was my choice to avoid,” Ray said.

The symptoms of lung cancer often aren’t obvious until the cancer spreads through a body. The subtle disease is the most common cancer worldwide, according to the World Cancer Research Fund.

In 2012, 1.8 million people were diagnosed with lung cancer. Of those, 1.6 million died.

Although the majority of cases are in current or ex-smokers, increasingly patients with minimal or no smoking history are being diagnosed.

The American Cancer Society states that each year 20 percent of people diagnosed with lung cancer in the U.S. aren’t smokers.

When Ray was diagnosed in February, the cancer had spread to eight parts of her body.

She has a rare form known as the ALK mutation. The mutation occurs when one gene rearranges and grows into another. Together, those genes drive the growth of cancer.

“There’s so much talk about supporting women with breast cancer, and stopping people from smoking to reduce lung cancer,” Ray said. “But this can just happen. And for those it happens to, it can feel isolating.”

The American Cancer Society reported that if lung cancer in non-smokers had its own category, it would rank among the top 10 fatal cancers in the United States.

In 2012, the Centers for Disease Control reported the U.S. government spent $54 million on anti-tobacco campaigns. That year, 86,740 died from the disease — roughly 17,000 of those people didn’t smoke.

Ray told her doctors never to tell her how long they expected her to live — she knew more than half of people with lung cancer die within a year of being diagnosed.

She had already fallen into a slim statistic — she believed she could do it again by surviving.

Ray sipped a glass of purified water while wearing her go-to yoga pants as she talked about the day she left Montana for treatment in Arizona.

She described going from being a health coach to surviving off pain medication, starting with ibuprofen and leading to the highest dose of narcotics she could have without overdosing.

She found an alternative cancer treatment, EuroMed Foundation, that balanced natural medicine with modern treatment.

“I had decided to try to live, and Arizona felt like the best option, so even though my friends argued about how to keep me there as I drolled on myself, I knew I had to go,” she said. “Many thought if I got on a plane, I’d never return to Montana, but they helped me.”

Ray lived in Arizona for six weeks with two chemotherapy treatments a week. She began to feel the cancer diminish as her body went through fevers and chills.

She started treatment March 1. By March 17, she was off morphine. By April 1, she had weaned herself off of the pain patch.

“Even my doctors told me they couldn’t believe it. I had known it was bad, but I didn’t know how bad until my mom saw me again for the first time and sobbed in relief,” she said.

Today, the cancer has been reduced to two areas of her body.

While doctors have said they expect her to enter remission sometime this fall, the cancer is too aggressive for her to stop treatment this year — which costs her about $8,000 out-of-pocket each month, not including travel expenses. Ray said she still needs about $30,000 to finish the year out.

But, Ray said she’s finally able to start making plans for her future again.

Ray said as she became more open with her effort to survive and what lung cancer looks like, friends and strangers began to reach out for advice. She said her experience has steered her toward a career that adds health and wellness to cancer treatment. She said she doesn’t want to influence what type of treatment people pick, but help them along the process, such as teaching them how to detox after treatments

“I never intended to be the face of a cancer patient, but now that people are reaching out asking me for advice, it’s a role I feel like I can play,” she said. “Both fortunately and unfortunately, my life this last year has equipped me to do that.”

To help support Ray’s remaining treatment costs, go to www.gofundme.com/Samantharay. To contact Ray for more information or to make a donation, email samantharay11@gmail.com.

Reporter Katheryn Houghton may be reached at 758-4436 or by email at khoughton@dailyinterlake.com.