Emma’s update: progression, radiotherapy and a bucket list completed with stage 4 ALK+ lung cancer
Emma first shared her story with us in 2025. She’s a statistician and mum of two who loves travelling, running and spending time with her boys. She was diagnosed with stage 4 ALK+ lung cancer in 2023, while pregnant with her second son, after numbness in her fingers was first misdiagnosed.
Her year started well. Stable scans last November meant she had a few months off from worrying about cancer, and she made the most of it. Emma, her husband and their two boys saw as much family as they could over Christmas, across Scotland and England, and her eldest son learnt to ride his bike.
“My eldest son learnt to ride his bike, a milestone that made me cry.”
In January she went away with friends to a lodge in the countryside, then went skiing with her aunt in France and Switzerland, her first ski trip in 17 years. She also took up fused glass making, cutting and layering glass before melting it together in a kiln.
February was harder. Emma finalised her medical retirement from work, which she found very sad. Then her scans showed the cancer had spread to her mediastinum, the area in the middle of the chest. A biopsy found a new mutation, which meant there wasn’t another targeted therapy she could switch to. Her options were radiotherapy or chemotherapy.
“This was pretty terrifying, as I’d always, naively, assumed I’d have another targeted therapy waiting for me upon progression.”
In June, after a family holiday in Croatia, she started twenty sessions of radical radiotherapy. She’d had few side effects from treatment until then, and she’d been told there was less than a one per cent chance she’d need hospital care. But she developed severe oesophagitis and spent a week in hospital in July and another in August. She could barely eat or drink and needed a pain relief pump and IV drips.
“Luckily my son’s first day of school fell between hospital stays, so I was able to walk him in on his very first day, a milestone I once worried I wouldn’t live to see.”
“Luckily my son’s first day of school fell between hospital stays, so I was able to walk him in on his very first day, a milestone I once worried I wouldn’t live to see.”
By mid-September she was nearly back to normal. She went on a women’s trip to Egypt, where she saw the pyramids, camped in the desert and swam with dolphins. That was the last thing on a bucket list she wrote in her early twenties, and one she thought she’d never finish after her diagnosis. Then she and her husband went to Iceland for their fifth wedding anniversary and saw the Northern Lights.
“It’s been amazing to get my life back after being bedridden for a lot of the summer, and I’m even more able to enjoy the little things in life than I was before, things like running around after my kids and eating chocolate.”
Somewhere in the middle of all that, Emma went to the Chelsea Flower Show for the first time with her mum. She also got her driving licence back, after losing it because of brain radiotherapy the year before. Her village has poor public transport, so having her independence back has been huge. She started therapy too, which has made it much easier to live with not knowing what’s ahead and with the anxiety around scans.
She also bought a road bike to train for Sir Chris Hoy’s Tour de 4, even though she hadn’t ridden a bike in almost 15 years and had never cycled on the roads. Radiotherapy meant she had to pull out of the 56-mile ride, but on the day she did the family ride with her son instead. She hopes to do the full distance next year.
Emma is now waiting for scan results that will show whether the radiotherapy worked, and whether she can keep driving. There’s a lot riding on them, but she says she feels strangely calm, partly thanks to therapy and partly because she’s fed up of worrying.
“I’m choosing to focus on the living I can do today, because I know all too well how quickly things can change.”
