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Health

Do smokers lungs heal after quitting? 

By Thomas Cayne

My aunt Erin recently started coughing more and more, up to a point that she could hardly have a normal conversation without coughing all over the place. (This was December 2024.)

And then she suddenly lost her voice.

What happened in the weeks after the incident took us all by surprise, but it truly constricted her future in the most unexpected way.

·      In mid December she contacted a pulmonologist who scheduled some standard medical examinations and MRI scans;

·      the medical images showed that one of her lungs had turned into a black raisin — almost nothing was left — and that the other one was infested by lung cancer (early January);

·      further medical scans (to pin down the stage) subsequently revealed that the cancer had spread to the bones. This was January 16, and there was not much left to say.

She didn’t make it to February.

The thing is: Aunt Erin had smoked for about twenty years, but she had quit more than thirty years ago, and still it caused last stage cancer so many years later. Lungs do get better after one quits smoking, but they never restore to their original state — often a lot of damage has been done, and can never ever be undone.

In case of my aunt Erin, she most probably had had lung cancer for many years on end, and it only surfaced (as is often the case in lung cancer), when all was lost —

And it started with a single cough.