Natalie Brown had a cough that wouldn’t go away. The 33-year-old non-smoker was shocked to be diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer . "Anybody can get lung cancer,” she says. “It doesn't matter if you smoke or not." A year ago, she had a double lung transplant as part of Northwestern's DREAM program, which performs transplants on patients with terminal lung cancer.

"Both her lungs were full of cancer," says Ankit Bharat, chief of thoracic surgery and executive director of the Northwestern Medicine Canning Thoracic Institute. "Natalie had a few weeks to live — if not days." The transplant went well, he says, but soon after, Natalie's back started hurting. Doctors discovered the cancer was in her spine. Despite this, her transplant surgeon is "quite optimistic" and says there are "

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