​​​​​​​​​​​​​​It doesn’t matter if you’ve successfully quit. If you were a regular smoker for an extended period of time, you are still at a greater risk to develop lung cancer. Early detection greatly increases the survival rate for lung cancer patients, so it’s important to know your risk and whether or not you should be screened – and how often, because cancer can still form long after you've quit. 

Take it from Dean Griffith. Though he no longer smokes, he knows the importance of being proactive and has continued to receive annual screenings, including the one that caught his cancer early enough to have it successfully removed by Julian Guitron, MD, a thoracic surgeon with The Christ Hospital Health Network.

Hear more about Dean’s experience and his advice about the importance of lung cancer screening for those at elevated risk.

Dean’s story in his own words:

It's a fairly simple life or death discussion. So many of these diseases can kill.

I'm 78 years old, have been retired for 12 years. I was a pastor of churches and an Army chaplain and a manager of nonprofit organizations. I'm a metal shop guy and I have a fondness for good whiskey.

We have a lot of kids and other people that we have adopted into our family, and when we have a family gathering, it's usually a bash and that keeps us busy.

About 30 years I smoked. All of a sudden one morning I started coughing and I coughed so hard I thought my lungs were going to come out through my mouth.

And I thought “this is ridiculous.” And I quit cold Turkey.

I went to the to the doctor for a physical. He discovered some minor heart disease and put me on medication. It set me to understand catching a disease of any sort.

So, in 2016, I started getting lung scans because you never quite outgrow your possibilities of lung cancer. Went to the lab at Christ, and from that point forward, I got lung scans every year until something odd was discovered because they had that background of all of those scans and the PET scan found nothing.

So they redid the CT scan. There was still this little anomaly. We did the biopsy and that's where they found the cancer.

The decision was made that it would be surgery, and then I learned that it was robotic and so much better for me because I knew plenty of people that had various kinds of robotic surgery, all with very positive outcomes. It went extremely well and I'm a happy camper.

You don't want to wait to see about your lungs until you're coughing up blood. It is very, very important to do these screens, especially if you know you're at risk.

This is not painful; it is not dangerous. It is helpful. I went through this, I survived. I'm better for it.

Go get the test. Don't wait until it's too late.

So, what I look forward to most is more time with my kids, my grandkids, more time with my family, more time with my shop, more travel, just more a lot of things. Enjoying that side of life, enjoying the beauty of the world we live in.