Wedding Preparations Turn Deadly

Aug. 24, 2006 — -- A 25-year-old newlywed returned to New York City from her honeymoon in the Caribbean, excited to embark on a fresh journey with her husband. But instead, within a few months of her wedding, she was in a hospital, on an operating table.

The newlywed, who has requested that her name not be used, remembers waking up in the middle of the night with a very sharp pain in her chest. "I could only describe it as feeling like what I think a heart attack must feel like. I felt like I'd been stabbed."

She went to her doctor and was reassured that a healthy, young Caucasian woman didn't get heart attacks.

The patient said her doctor told her it could be acid reflux or, possibly, stress related to just coming off the wedding. But he gave her an electrocardiogram and an X-ray just to be sure.

During the X-ray, the technician saw something on the left side of the young woman's lung, so she had her get a CAT scan. The newlywed decided to call her godmother, Maureen Zakowski, a thoracic pathologist specializing in the lung region.

She showed Zakowski her X-ray. Zakowski knew what she saw was not normal. "It was a rounded lesion, and all I could think of was that she had developed a tumor."

Zakowski recommended that her goddaughter's chest images be seen by Dr. Michelle Ginsberg, an expert in interpreting lung and chest images.

"The findings were so evident that you could have seen them from across the room," Ginsberg said.

Since the patient was young and -- up to this point -- healthy, doctors believed she had pneumonia or had caught something while she was on her honeymoon.

Ginsberg revisited the young woman's symptoms. "She had chest pain, and she had a cough but really no fever. She had no night sweats."

Doctors questioned if she'd been exposed to any new pets, any new products that could trigger an allergic reaction, or if she'd been taking any over-the-counter medications or illicit drugs. Finally, doctors had one question lingering in their minds: Could it be cancer?