By John Perry

On April 11, Cole Wright’s oncologist calculated cancer’s cruel arithmetic: Cole had only six months to live.

Choosing not to end his life in the antiseptic world of a hospital ward, Cole moved in with his sister and niece, spending his last months in a small, spare bedroom of their Grenada, Mississippi home. Because of fluid buildup in his lungs, he slept sitting up.

Death was coming closer. On the evening of Oct. 10, Cole felt its icy, impatient presence. He whispered to his sister that he wouldn’t be with them much longer.

Noticing that his shallow breathing had become more labored, she phoned Cole’s son Alvin Wright to come soon.
Wright told his aunt he would hurry.

For Wright’s father, the warning signs first appeared as a persistent cough. Not too bad at first. Everyone thought at 75, Cole was simply having a difficult time shaking a bad cold. Maybe it was just hay fever. Or at worst, emphysema.

Then came sharp chest pains and shortness of breath.
Cole lost his appetite and started dropping weight. He became so fatigued even walking was an effort. Then came the hoarseness that never went away. And always the nagging cough until, finally, he was spitting up small amounts of blood.

He went to his family doctor, who diagnosed pleurisy, an inflammation of the double membrane around the lungs. But as a precaution, he referred Cole to an oncologist.

“My father finally made the right decision to see a doctor,” said Wright, a survivor of prostate cancer. “But he made it too late.”

X-rays, CAT scans, blood and other tests confirmed lung cancer.
Surgery for Cole was not an option. His cancer had already spread beyond the lungs. In Stage 1, when the cancer hasn’t spread, lung cancer surgery is successful 88 percent of the time.

Cole and his physicians opted for chemotherapy. But it failed to arrest the spread.

“The lining of dad’s lungs was being taken over by cancer cells,” said Wright, a 14-year Police public information officer, now a senior staff analyst in Public Works & Engineering.

“They never found a tumor.”

Sometimes there isn’t one.

The two main types of lung cancers are classified as small cell and non-small cell cancers. Eighty percent of primary lung cancers are made of small but aggressive oat-shaped cells that recruit otherwise healthy cells lining air passages to join their evil, abnormal growth. They spread so rapidly tumors seldom form.

“We wanted to know the cause,” Wright said. “And I’m pretty sure we found it.”

Although Wright’s father had kicked the habit decades ago, he had been a heavy cigarette smoker for 15 to 20 years before the dangers of smoking were fully appreciated.

Researchers agree that 87 percent of lung cancers are the result of smoking or exposure to secondary tobacco smoke. (Source: The Mayo Clinic.)

“If you stop smoking before cancer cells develop, after about 10 years or so, the risk of developing lung cancer is reduced to about one-half of what it would have been if you continued to smoke,” said Dr. Wendy Woodward, assistant professor of radiation oncology at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. “But there is that rare exception when damage done years ago doesn’t manifest as a cancer until much later.

“The problem is that lung cancers are peculiarly erratic and hard to predict,” Woodward said.

Other risk factors include age, a family history of cancer, certain eating habits, obesity, lack of exercise, exposure to radiation or other cancer-causing agents, and certain hereditary genetic predispositions. (Source: National Cancer Institute.)

Doctors didn’t know when Cole’s cancer began, but they knew when it would end.

He died Oct. 11.

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