1. Wheezing or shortness of breath

One of the first signs lung cancer patients remember noticing when they look back is the inability to catch their breath. "I couldn't even walk across the yard without wheezing. I thought I had asthma, but how come I didn't have it before?" is how one woman described it.

2. Chronic cough or chest pain

Several types of cancer, including leukemia and lung tumors, can cause symptoms that mimic a bad cough or bronchitis. One way to tell the difference: The problems persist, or go away and come back again in a repeating cycle. Some lung cancer patients report chest pain that extends up into the shoulder or down the arm.

3. Frequent fevers or infections

These can be signs of leukemia, a cancer of the blood cells that starts in the bone marrow. Leukemia causes the marrow to produce abnormal white blood cells, which crowd out healthy white cells, sapping the body's infection-fighting capabilities. Often, doctors finally catch leukemia in older adults after the patient has been in a number of times complaining of fever, achiness, and flu-like symptoms over an extended period of time.

4. Difficulty swallowing

Most commonly associated with esophageal or throat cancer, having trouble swallowing is sometimes one of the first signs of lung cancer, too.

11 Foods for Healthy Bones

Build a strong structure

When it comes to building strong bones, there are two key nutrients: calcium and vitamin D. Calcium supports your bones and teeth structure, while vitamin D improves calcium absorption and bone growth.

These nutrients are important early in life, but they may also help as you age. If you develop osteoporosis, a disease characterized by brittle and breaking bones, getting plenty of calcium and vitamin D may slow the disease and prevent fractures.

Adults up to age 50 should get 1,000 milligrams of calcium and 200 international units (IUs) of vitamin D a day. Adults over 50 should get 1,200 milligrams of calcium and 400 to 600 IU of vitamin D. Get these nutrients by trying these 11 foods for healthy bones.

Yogurt

Most people get their vitamin D through exposure to sunlight, but certain foods, like yogurt, are fortified with vitamin D.

One cup of yogurt can be a creamy way to get your daily calcium. Stonyfield Farms makes a fat-free plain yogurt that contains 30% of your calcium and 20% of your vitamin D for the day.

And though we love the protein-packed Greek yogurts, these varieties tend to contain less calcium and little, if any, vitamin D.

Milk

There’s a reason milk is the poster child for calcium.

13 things

A Sleepy Secret

A healthy young man falls into a coma, but there are few other signs that anything else is wrong. Then comes the real surprise.

The woman burst through the emergency room doors shouting: “Where’s my son?”

“Over here,” I blurted, startled by her entrance. Short and wiry, she flew past the paramedics to her motionless, well-built 25-year-old. Then, turning to me, she rose on the balls of her feet and hissed, “I told those doctors he needed an MRI!”

“Does he have epilepsy, ma’am?” I asked carefully. “Any type of seizure disorder?”

“He did this once before,” she continued, as if not listening. “Those idiots upstate couldn’t tell me what was wrong. Three months ago he had this…event. Same as today. They told us to see a neurologist. But the damn insurance company wouldn’t approve the MRI.”

Trying to take control of the situation, I pulled aside the lead paramedic. “Tell me again—why did you intubate him?”

“He was comatose,” the burly man in the blue uniform said. “Didn’t respond to Narcan,” an antidote to overdoses of opiates, like heroin. “Then he started seizing.”

“Full-blown seizures?” I asked.

“Hard to tell,” the paramedic replied, wiping his forehead. “Jerking his arms back and forth, not breathing well. We decided not to wait, so we sedated him—that stopped the seizures—and then we put the tube in.”

Comatose patients have a tendency to vomit stomach contents into their lungs. A cuffed breathing tube prevents that. “Sounds reasonable,” I said. “And when the family called 911, what exactly did they say?”

“Mom found him in bed, couldn’t wake him up.”