Mary's Story

Mary Jordan spent her entire career in the medical field, first as an intensive care nurse in New York City hospitals and later as a specialty nurse for a clinical therapy medical supply company.

For nearly 30 years, she was a smoker – until she quit in 2015 and figured her health was fine. She didn’t have the usual smoking-habit symptoms. No persistent cough. No shortness of breath. No chest pain or unexplained weight loss.

“I’ve always been pretty healthy. I worked out all the time,” she points out. “I was totally asymptomatic. I had smoked for many years, and I thought I had just been lucky.”

So Mary was a bit surprised – and later extremely grateful – when she retired, moved to Jupiter in 2022 and was urged in late 2023 by her new family physician to undergo a CT scan of her lungs, given her history of smoking.

“I thought I was free and clear, but when the CT scan came back, they saw a suspicious marker in the upper right lobe of my lung, and because I didn’t have any symptoms, they felt it was something they should test further with a whole-body PET scan to uncover minute cancer cells,” Mary recalls. She was referred to Jupiter Medical Center’s Thoracic Surgery and Lung Center of Excellence for further tests with Dr. K. Adam Lee, the center’s medical director, and Dr. Kevin Green, a board-certified lung specialist.

AI-informed Optellum software aids diagnosis, treatment
Aided by artificial intelligence-supported diagnostic software called Optellum, the scans identified a tiny tumor (about the size of her pinky fingernail) in her right lung, “and because they caught it so early, I had an incredible surgical procedure to remove the tumor, a quick recovery, and I’ve had no recurrence since,” says Mary, 71. “Had I not been offered this technology at Jupiter Medical Center, and if they hadn’t used the AI technology to detect cancer, I wouldn’t be in the position I’m in today.”

“I feel lucky and very fortunate,” adds Mary, who continues to exercise daily. “As an ICU nurse, I took care of lung cancer patients in the early 1970s and 1980s. Back then, surgeons often had to remove large portions of the lung because cancer was hard to detect. That’s why I tell my story to anyone who smoked or still smokes. Don’t wait. Get the scan done now. If you wait or put off your regular cancer checks, by the time they find a lump, a nodule or cancer, it might be too late.”

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the U.S. and worldwide; patients whose cancer is identified late in the disease process have fewer treatment options and lower survival rates, according to Optellum data, which also notes that AI-supported lung scans and deep-learning models can reduce by 50% the time to diagnose lung cancer while supporting more precise follow-up care.

Schedule checkups, remain vigilant
Mary’s advice: Schedule annual checkups and cancer scans regularly, especially as you age. If you smoked or still smoke, ask about a chest X-ray or lung scan.

“Prevention is definitely worth an ounce of cure – that’s the reality,” she emphasizes. “A lot of older people don’t go to a doctor until it’s too late and they are quite sick, but when you’re older, you’ve got to find a physician who will look at your whole body and your whole history. My outcome could have been very expensive…chemotherapy, radiation, surgery, hospital care, maybe even a nursing home. But the way I look at it, this screening test bought me a couple more decades of life.

“It doesn’t matter if cancer runs in your family or not,” she adds. “You have to understand your body and listen to what your body is telling you. And now with all of the AI tools that specialists have to make better predictions and diagnoses, it’s worth it.

“I was very fortunate to have found the right place and the right doctors at Jupiter Medical Center,” she says with grateful confidence. “I probably wouldn’t be here without them and their expertise.”