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<\/p>\nNEED TO KNOW<\/p>\n
Heather Quintana was feeling under the weather for weeks<\/p>\n
After several doctor visits, they kept giving her antibiotics, but she wasn’t getting better<\/p>\n
When she finally got a CT scan, they found “cancer everywhere”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Around Christmas that year, she found herself constantly bringing lozenges around to help quell her cough. But still, her symptoms never subsided. Then,\u00a0in February 2024, she became even more congested.<\/p>\n
“I was having a very bad cold, and it became worse with extreme lung congestion and fatigue,” she tells PEOPLE. “I started to wheeze.\u00a0I thought, ‘This cold really got worse. Maybe I have pneumonia.’ “<\/p>\n
She went to urgent care, and they took an X-ray, noticing cloudiness in her lungs, agreeing it was likely pneumonia.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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Heather Quintana <\/p>\n
Heather Quintana<\/p>\n
In late March, she scheduled a visit with her primary doctor and got a CT scan that showed nodules in her lungs.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“I go through the bronchoscopy, they pull the sample, I wake up and the doctor’s there,” she recalls. “He says it was cancerous.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“The results come in on a Sunday afternoon when there’s nobody to call.\u00a0The 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.”<\/p>\n
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Heather Quintana <\/p>\n
Heather Quintana<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
“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.’ “<\/p>\n
She tried calling her oncologist when she got her results, but was told her doctor was on vacation for the next two weeks.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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Heather Quintana <\/p>\n
Heather Quintana<\/p>\n