Date Published: 01/29/2020 [Source]
It's a warm November afternoon in Cottonwood Heights, a suburb of Salt Lake City, and the leaves are piling up in Dustin and Emily Wallis' backyard, but Dustin isn't raking. There's no time for that, or energy. Dustin is in his living room, thinking about the tumors in his brain.
Just a little over a month ago, Dustin went to the neurologist for an MRI and hopefully some answers as to why he'd been experiencing debilitating migraines and shoulder pain for months. He didn't come home that night.
Instead, the 39-year-old father of two was sent to the hospital and prepped for brain surgery. There were two tumors in his brain, a large one and a smaller one, a tumor in his shoulder and a tumor on his lung.
Doctors were cautious to not use the word "cancer" until they had more information, but Dustin and Emily knew it was coming before they actually heard the diagnosis: Stage 4 non-small cell squamous cell carcinoma — terminal lung cancer.
Secondhand smoke, air pollution, asbestos and exposure to chemicals are all factors.
But the second-leading cause of lung cancer, according to the EPA, is something called radon — an odorless, invisible gas. It's the largest single exposure to natural radiation any of us will face.
In Utah alone, 1 in 3 homes, or nearly 320,000 households, have dangerous levels of radon.
Dustin never smoked, or lived in a home with smokers.
He will probably never know exactly what caused his cancer, but today he wonders if his diagnosis is somehow related to radon.
He grew up in Vernal, Utah, in one of the state's seven high-risk counties for potentially elevated indoor radon levels.
Radon may be one of the deadliest killers in Utah, and one of the most ignored.
It might also be the answer to a question that has long puzzled doctors and patients: why is lung cancer the leading cause of cancer deaths in a state where 90% of people don't smoke?
As radon gas bubbles up from uranium in the soil, it dissipates to near harmless levels in the outdoor environment. But when radon finds its way through cracks in foundations and settles in basements and buildings with less air circulation, it begins to accumulate. Radon can also be found in water, most often in private wells.