In this episode, Lawrence Phillips, an endocrinologist at Emory Clinic, a professor at Emory University School of Medicine, and medical director of the Clinical Studies Center at the Atlanta VA Medical Center, discusses pushing through lung cancer to continue doing what he loves—seeing patients, teaching, and conducting research.

Something odd turned up in one of Phillips’s routine health screenings in 2008. A radiologist who was examining Phillips’s CT scan images to look at his coronary arteries noticed a mass in his left lung.

Phillips had previously been told not to worry about the mass because it wasn’t growing.

“Well, that’s not true,” Phillips recalled the radiologist saying. The tumor had, indeed, grown.

Three days later, Phillips had it removed via segmentectomy. He thought his lung cancer was over and done with.

But in 2014, his surgery scar had started to change. It lit up in a PET scan. So, Phillips had a lobectomy, after which he learned he had an EGFR mutation.

Eventually, Phillips began a treatment regimen gefitinib, which he still takes today. He is currently free of evidence of disease.

Phillips spoke with Deborah Doroshow, associate professor of medicine at the Tisch Cancer Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

A transcript of this conversation is available on the Cancer History Project.