AURORA, Colo. (KDVR) — Ross Camidge is the director of the Thoracic Oncology Department at the University of Colorado Cancer Center.
The doctor, who has an MD and Ph.D, has helped treat thousands of lung cancer patients from more than 40 states and over 40 countries. Now, in a life twist, Camidge is a lung cancer patient himself.
His journey started in June of 2022.
“I noticed a wheezing noise when I was exercising,” Camidge remembers.
He went to see his primary care doctor to see if he was developing asthma and asked for a chest X-ray.
“I left the office, got the chest X-ray, and then walked to my office, which is all in the same building, and I pulled up the X-ray on my computer, and I went, ‘Oh my goodness, I’ve got lung cancer,'” he recalled.
Camidge saw a doctor and was diagnosed with an advanced non-smoking-related lung cancer driven by a specific mutation. The cancer had spread and is not curable, but it is manageable with targeted therapy in the form of pills.
“I started on those pills, and then we had additional therapy like I added in some chemotherapy, and I added in some radiation therapy, all of the kind of treatments that we’ve helped develop over the last few years, and then I get to benefit from it,” he said.
Three years after his diagnosis, Camidge decided to go public and show people that many cancers can be managed more like a chronic disease.
“I just thought I could do some good. I could do some good by coming out and saying ‘Look here I am, I’m still working, I’m still teaching, I’m still researching’ and ‘Oh, by the way, I have cancer,’ and that’s the message that you want to try and give: That cancer and value are not mutually exclusive words,” he said.
He is also working to improve treatments and the language used to describe the side effects.
“My personal bugbear is when doctors say this treatment is tolerable, and you go well, you are not the one having it, you can’t say that,” he said with a smile.
