When Frank McKenna first felt a dry, hacky cough in 2016, he assumed it was just a lingering cold. After all, he’d been a personal trainer for more than 30 years — a lifelong non-smoker who ate healthy and worked out daily.
But the cough didn’t go away. When doctors drained two liters of fluid from his lung and found cancer cells, the diagnosis came as a shock: stage four lung cancer that had already spread throughout his body.
Further testing revealed McKenna carried a genetic mutation known as EGFR, a driver of certain lung cancers often found in patients who have never smoked.
“It was hard to accept,” McKenna said. “But it was also presented as a challenge to me. I need to do the best that I can do for my body and my mind so that I can go through this journey.”
Instead of chemotherapy, his oncologist prescribed a daily pill, which is a targeted therapy designed to block that mutation and slow tumor growth.
Nearly nine years later, McKenna is still taking the medication and continuing his work as a trainer in Virginia Beach. He’s also turned his experience into a mission to support others living with cancer.
“My motto was ‘win the day,’” McKenna said. “That came about by thinking, ‘I can get up in the morning and if I just win that one day, I can get up every day with that attitude, I'm going to win today. I'm going to beat cancer today and win the day.’”
In Hampton Roads, McKenna’s story isn’t as rare as it once was.
Kim Norris, president and co-founder of the Lung Cancer Foundation of America, said the area’s shipbuilding and military industries expose thousands of workers to paints, welding fumes and other airborne chemicals that can damage the lungs over time.
“Lung cancer has always carried this stigma that it’s a smoker’s disease,” Norris said. “But that’s a total misnomer.”
Lung cancer is the second most common cancer in the U.S. and remains the leading cause of cancer deaths nationwide. Norris said the survival rate for stage four lung cancer is close to 30%.
Norris said more than 65% of new lung cancer diagnoses now occur in people who either never smoked or quit decades earlier.
Early screening is one of the most effective ways to catch lung cancer before it spreads, yet across the U.S. only about one in six eligible high-risk people are screened.
According to the American Lung Association’s 2025 report, only 18.4% of Virginians eligible for lung-cancer screening receive it.
Norris said restrictive eligibility guidelines, which historically focused on smoking history, leave many high-risk people untested.
“You have so many more treatment options if you qualify for early screening,” McKenna said. "Even if you have a smoking history, that doesn't mean you deserve lung cancer. It just means it was something that happened to you as a course of your life, whether you smoked or whether you didn't smoke,” McKenna said.
Some national guidelines have begun to recognize additional risk factors like family history, radon exposure and workplace chemicals, but Norris said more needs to be done to expand access.
Sherif El-Mahdy, a physician with Sentara Health and assistant professor at Old Dominion University’s Macon & Joan Brock Virginia Health Sciences, said more people should talk with their healthcare provider about lung-cancer screening — especially those who work around asbestos or other airborne hazards — even if they don’t meet the current smoking-based eligibility criteria.
He said that the landscape of lung-cancer treatment has changed dramatically in the past decade.
“We have a lot of therapies that we did not have previously for lung cancer, including targeted therapies,” El-Mahdy said. “I think that the landscape for lung cancer therapies has evolved quite a bit.”
McKenna now partners with local health providers to run wellness programs for people with cancer that combine exercise, mindfulness and peer support.
He said staying active not only helps with the physical side effects of treatment but also gives patients a sense of control.
“I'm doing something that's important for the lung cancer community, and it just helped me to kind of spread the word,” McKenna said.
