Ellen McVicker knows she was lucky.
Lucky that her lung cancer was detected incidentally, during a scan for shoulder surgery. Lucky that the cancer was caught early, before it was able to spread to other parts of her body. And lucky that she received care at the University of Colorado Anschutz Cancer Center, where cancer center member and cardiothoracic surgeon Robert Meguid, MD, MPH, FACS, performed an operation in August 2025 to remove the cancer from her lung.
“When I went under with Dr. Meguid, he said, ‘I'm either going to take out this nodule, take out the nodule and the margins around it, or I will take out your entire upper right lobe,’” says McVicker, 72, who with her husband lives half the year in Aurora and the other half in Florida. “He ended up taking the whole lobe, which was wonderful because he saved me from having to do chemo and radiation. It's the same thing that happened to Pope Leo.”
But McVicker’s road to lung cancer surgery wasn’t always a straight one. The nodule on her right lung was first detected in 2011, when she received a scan after experiencing shoulder pain. Her doctors made a note to keep an eye on it. It was a similar story in 2014, when she had shoulder replacement surgery. Subsequent pain from the replacement required more surgeries and more scans, and eventually doctors realized the nodule was growing larger.
“For three years, my doctor said, ‘We're just going to keep an eye on it.’ And then, in 2025, he said, ‘It’s time for it to come out,’” McVicker recalls. “It hadn't grown much, but he said it had to come out, and I was very hesitant because I had had so many surgeries, and I wasn’t in any pain. I said, ‘I can't handle another surgery.’ I just had too much.”
Then she met with Meguid, who explained that if treatment continued to be delayed, she may have a higher likelihood of lung cancer spread.
“Mrs. McVicker had a very low-intensity and remote smoking history, so she didn’t qualify for lung cancer screening based on the current guidelines,” Meguid says. “However, she and her providers were diligent in catching the finding on her imaging for her shoulder and following up on this, leading to her early lung cancer diagnosis.”
Though McVicker was reluctant, Meguid says, she and her doctors did everything right to get her in for treatment before the cancer had the chance to get worse.
“She was diligent about following up, and her primary care physician was diligent about following up to make sure it didn't get ignored,” he says. “Ellen came to our lung nodule screening clinic, where the nodule was found to be suspicious, so she came to me for surgical management.”
Meguid performed robotic surgery to remove a small wedge of the lung surrounding the nodule; the wedge was immediately examined by pathologists and found to be cancerous, so Meguid removed the entire lobe to have the best chance of eliminating all the cancer.
“The point behind the lobectomy is to concurrently take out any lymph nodes which may contain cancer and then also do a lymph node dissection of mediastinal lymph nodes so we can be thorough in staging her as well as resect any known and suspected cancer,” Meguid says. “This is associated with the greatest chances of survival.”
Because the surgery was done robotically, McVicker had only small incisions and faster and higher-quality recovery than with an open operation. She was discharged two days after surgery and is now back to normal life, including walking three miles a day and spending time with her children.
“Only because I had my shoulder problem would I have ever known about it,” she says. “Otherwise, I would have probably died from lung cancer.”
Long before her nodule was discovered, cancer already was part of McVicker’s life. She knew several people who died from the disease, and in 2006, when her cousin was diagnosed with cancer, she asked McVicker, a kindergarten teacher, to help her find a way to tell her young children about her diagnosis.
“My cousin called me and said, ‘I have cancer, Ellen, and I don't know how to tell my 3-and 5-year-old children.’ The next morning I woke up with these sentences in my mind, and I started creating a book,” McVicker says. “I sent her the words, and she called me back the next day and said, ‘Oh my God, your words really helped them understand it.’ She was an artist, and two years later, I said, ‘Well, how about illustrating the book?’ So she did.”
The result of that collaboration, “Butterfly Kisses and Wishes on Wings,” is now recommended by cancer organizations across the country as a model for how parents can tell their children about their cancer diagnosis.
“It's been quite a journey,” McVicker says. “It started in 2006, and it's still going. That’s my legacy.”
Ironically, McVicker didn’t tell her own children about her lung surgery, mainly because she didn’t think the nodule would turn out to be cancerous.
“I just did not believe I had cancer,” she says. “A lot of people have lots of nodules in their lungs, and I did not believe that mine was cancerous. So I never said to my kids, ‘Mommy has cancer.’ I never ever mentioned it to them until I was having the surgery, and my son said, ‘Are you kidding me? You write a book for all these children around the world, and you don't talk to us about it?’ I said, ‘I really didn't believe that I had it.’”
Meguid now sees McVicker every six months, doing imaging to make sure there are no signs of the cancer returning. McVicker says she sometimes thinks about the possibility of a recurrence, but the possibility doesn’t scare her.
“I'm kind of strange that way. I have had so many friends who have been so horribly ill with cancer that what I've had is nothing,” she says. “I've had a very blessed life. I've accomplished a lot; I've done wonderful things with my family and my children and my friends. I'm not afraid of dying.”
Meguid says that lung cancer experts expect patients with stage 1A lung cancer, including McVicker and Pope Leo, to live out their full lives despite the history of cancer.
“Stage 1A lung cancer is typically tumors less than or equal to 3 centimeters in size without spread to lymph nodes,” he says. “The 5-year recurrence rate is around 15%. Through diligent surveillance by a provider such as an oncologist, pulmonologist, thoracic surgeon, or primary care provider, any findings concerning for recurrence or new lung cancer can be detected.”
Meguid adds that though efforts are underway to expand lung cancer screening to more people — especially given the fact that lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death — current lung cancer screening guidelines are for patients aged 50-80 years, with a cigarette smoking history of at least 20 pack years (smoking 1 pack of cigarettes per day for 20 years, of 2 packs of cigarettes per day for 10 years), and currently smoking or having quit within the last 15 years.
“Screening starts with a low-dose chest CT and a shared decision-making clinic visit to discuss impact of findings,” Meguid says. “However, most patients diagnosed with lung cancer aren’t currently eligible for lung cancer screening. Therefore, if you have a family history of lung cancer, significant secondhand or other smoke exposure or are concerned about lung cancer, please discuss this with your health care provider.”