JACKSONVILLE, Fla -- November is Lung Cancer Awareness month. It's a cancer that isn't often in the spotlight, even though it accounts for more deaths each year than colon, prostate and breast cancer combined.
While many lung cancer patients often do not live longer than a year after diagnosis, we have a story this morning of one man who is beating the odds.
Since his diagnosis seven months ago, he has managed to keep a positive attitude.
And it's that positivity that is helping on his journey to remission.
It only takes a second chatting with Robert Austin to realize he's a happy guy -- always smiling. Its the kind of smile that's contagious. That's probably the reason he can make friends wherever he goes.
At only 32 years old, he looked to the future with that same big smile. Until...
"I just knew, I hear you doc...but that's not going to work for me," said Robert.
April 21st 2011. For a mere moment, the smile subsided as his doctor delivered a diagnosis Robert never imagined would come his way.
"When I found out the first thing I thought is cancer cannot live inside of me. Period."
Robert was speechless. He's an avid exerciser. A non-smoker. And now, a stage three lung cancer patient. But one more thing about Robert -- he's a fighter. And he decided right then and there he wasn't going to let this potentially deadly cancer take him down.
"I can't put my head in the sand and allow this thing to take me over. There are too many people supporting me to allow that to happen," he said.
It didn't matter what the disease threw his way. Chemotherapy. Radiation. A drug causing rashes all over his body. Robert didn't let the constant hospital visits keep him from work. And didn't let the continuous pain keep him in bed.
And remember all those friends Robert so easily made, well each one of them is helping to keep his battle on the winning track. More-so, he told his doctor, than the work of any drug.
"I said to him and I quote, your medical treatment is two percent of what's really going to get me to remission, doc. Because the other 98 percent are all these people behind me."
And today - Robert and his army aren't the only ones smiling. His doctors are too. So far, his treatment is working. His mass is shrinking. And that future Robert has always dreamed of isn't just a distant hope or fleeting memory. Its something he's already living...one day at a time.
"The only direction, the absolute only direction, is to move forward. Because you can beat it. You can win and it does not have to take you over," Robert said.
Robert says he got this incredible inner strength from his father. When Robert was eight, his dad was in a car accident that left him paralyzed from the neck down. It changed his family's life.
But Robert says he never once heard his father ask "why me?" And you'll never hear those words come out of Robert's mouth, either.
And now Robert is fully anticipating hearing the word "remission" come out of his doctor's mouth in the not so distant future.
