(OSV News) — A Missouri woman diagnosed with lung cancer told OSV News that Pope Leo’s diagnosis with the same disease has helped strengthen her own Catholic faith amid her illness.

“The fact that I shared such a diagnosis with the pope — I’m kind of touched,” said Lisa Koester. “I felt like I wasn’t alone.”

The 64-year-old Koester, a resident of Imperial, Missouri, said she’d been getting regular lung screenings for “at least eight to 10 years” as a former smoker.

Recently, she said, “they found something.” 

God’s plan amid lung cancer diagnosis

Her physician, Dr. Nirmal Veeramachaneni of Saint Louis University and SSM Health, immediately ordered a positron emission tomography, or PET, scan, which uses a radioactive tracer to detect early signs of cancer, as well as heart and neurological disorders.

Koester received the scan results in late August while spending time with her family.

“My son had just moved back from Utah and got engaged,” she said. “We were sitting in their new home and I got the results of my test, and I just started crying. My husband was crying, my son was crying, because we knew it was something. Even though it was only the size of a grape, that’s big enough.”

Koesler said that through their tears, she and her family resolved to face their cancer experience with courage.

“We just started saying, ‘These are the cards that have been dealt to us. This is God’s plan for me, and this is what we have to work through,'” she recalled.

With a localized mass detected, she said, surgery was ordered “before it spread into the chest wall.”

Facing cancer with prayer

First came a battery of pre-operative tests — and a month of waiting before entering the hospital.

Koester said “a lot of prayer” sustained her during that in-between period.

“My husband, my son, my family were great,” she said. “They stood by me. We were all going through it. This is a family issue; all of our lives are impacted.”

Having worked for a decade as a health care professional at an oncology practice, Koester knew that “it’s easy to say, ‘Don’t worry about it. Wait for the results.'”

But, she said, “You still think about it.” 

Following the late September surgery — which saw doctors remove an upper lobe — Koester learned testing had shown she had not one, but two types of stage one cancer: squamous cell and small cell, the latter of which is less common and more aggressive. 

Koester said she was advised that having two concurrent types of lung cancer is “very rare,” but added the small cell cancer, according to her oncological team, may be genetic.

Drawing deeply on faith, pointing to Pope Leo

Now, with additional tests and consultations ahead, Koester is drawing even more deeply on her faith and urging others to get regular lung cancer screenings.

“If the pope can get it, anybody can,” she said.

Koester said she is cherishing time with her family, while reflecting on the sudden and mysterious turns life can take.

“We don’t know the end of the story, and we’re in the middle of this journey,” she said. 

Cancer has brought her “even closer to God,” she said — and reminders of his presence are all around, even in the pattern of leaves in a tree near her home.

“I look out my bay window every day, and I see this face like Jesus in the leaves,” said Koester. “I know he’s here with me.”

Gina Christian is a multimedia reporter for OSV News. Follow her on X @GinaJesseReina.