The 47-year-old Bill Powell felt a chronic pain around the left side of his chest. He didn’t pay much attention to it, until he began to feel shortness of breath at rest.
One month later, tests revealed the cause of the pain: metastatic adenocarcinoma. Cancer of unknown origin, was detected in a gland.
Powell was an executive in a major credit card company, athletic and in good shape. He had been a long-distance bicyclist, champion softball player, canoeist and road racer, competed in two half-marathons.
When doctors found the source of the cancer 18 months later, the news was even worse. Powell had mesothelioma, with a mortality rate near 100 percent.
The most common cause of mesothelioma is exposure to asbestos.