Shirley Adams knew that blood in her cough was a bad sign. Her doctor attributed her symptoms to a bad sinus infection, but she pushed for more testing. A diagnosis of lung cancer hit especially hard.

"As I was standing in the window, waiting for the doctor to come in, I realized it was April 15th," she said. "Which was the same day I had lost my husband to lung cancer in 1999."

But Adams' perserverance made her story different from her husbands'.

"For me to be my own advocate and insist on some tests that would definitely tell us saved my life," she said. "When I got to Duke, they told me that if I had not caught it when I did, I would have been dead in one year."

"I think in general patients are very tuned into their own bodies and they can tell when something's wrong," said Dr. David White, thoracic surgeon at Duke Raleigh Hospital. "If they're overly tired, if they're losing weight, if they have a cough that will just not go away."

Even though she caught it early, Adams' cancer was too advanced for her to be a candidate for surgery. But after 33 rounds of radiation and four rounds of chemotherapy, she got the word that her cancer is gone.

Adams will celebrate being cancer-free by walking in the Free to Breathe Lung Cancer 5K on Saturday, Nov. 7 at N.C. State's Centennial Campus. She said she wants to help increase awareness of the nation's number one cancer killer.

"Lung cancer is the number one killer even if you combined all the other cancers together and I just think everybody needs to know that," she said. "But there is hope. And if we can bring more awareness to it and more research, it would be great."

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