IEA_AARST_Radon_Reporter_JUNE_2024

10 | June 2024 TESTIMONY Radon - I Didn’t Know Kerri Robbins When Kerri Robbins, of Lehi Utah, took to the stage at the Indoor Environments 2023 in Nashville this past November, it was to share her story with the State and Tribal Radon Program leaders. during the presentation about Utah Department of Environmental Quality’s outreach campaign by Eleanor Divver. The state’s awareness plan spelled out where they focused messaging about testing. The demonstrated results showed how media (news and socials) aided in the goal. IEA caught up with Kerri this month to talk to her more about her story. Kerri’s story began one morning (June 3rd, 2022) while working out on her treadmill, with a shocking and strange health episode that took her to the ER. Assuming she had had a ministroke, they did a brain MRI along with numerous other tests. Three hours later she was discharged with a probable ministroke and instructions to see a neurosurgeon because they had found the possibility of a brain tumor on the MRI. It took two months to be seen by her neurosurgeon who identified not one but ultimately three more tumors in her brain. They sent her to an oncologist. That oncologist scheduled a PET scan that showed a small spot on her left lung, then a biopsy to see if it was malignant. On August 30th, sitting in the exam room with her husband, two of her daughters, and her third daughter on the phone from Kansas City, the oncologist told Kerri that she had Stage 4 lung cancer. In disbelief as to “how this could happen”, her oncologist’s vague reply was “Who knows, there’s environmental issues, there’s radon, more & more women are being diagnosed all the time with non-smoking lung cancer, particularly Asian women and no one knows why.” This conversation occurred almost three months to the day of that June trip to the ER. The cancer had metastasized from her lungs to her brain. While it was that oncologist who uttered the word “radon” to Kerri, two more months elapsed before a different specialist directly asked her if she had tested her home for radon. It was almost another three months and more information-seeking conversations before the Robbins’ mitigation system was installed. In those three months – a few more things happened. Shortly after she was diagnosed, a neighbor who also had non-smoking lung cancer urged her to contact a thoracic cancer specialist and make sure the treatment plan she was on was the correct one for her. Kerri says, “A few weeks after my last radiation treatment I was started on a daily chemo pill and things were finally starting to settle down, so I called to make an appt with the specialist, Dr. Wallace Akerley at Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt Lake City. When I called, Dr. Akerley answered the phone, he told me I had called his back office. I was mortified, I had called the number on the website, but I think fate intervened. The first thing Dr. Akerley asked me was if I smoked and I said no, then he asked me if we had tested our home for radon. I told him I didn’t know I needed to. He informed me it was one of the leading causes of non-smoking lung cancer diagnoses. One of my friends sent me a link for a free test from Utah Radon Services; she worked at a local hospital, and it was information she had available from work. We tested, threw it in the mailbox the morning we flew out to Kansas City to see my daughter and grandkids for a long weekend, and had results back in a week. 31.3 picocuries – that was the radon level in our home. I didn’t know anything about radon but boy was that going to change.” There are so many connections in Kerri’s story. What did Kerri do to change awareness? She says, first and foremost she was angry, more at the fact that as an intelligent woman, she didn’t know anything about radon! Kerri says she had to let people know about this. She went onto her Lehi city Facebook page, telling her neighbors about radon. The next morning, she was still angry and determined to tell more people about what was happening to her. She reached out to a local news station, KSL-TV based in Salt Lake City, and spoke to them about the danger of radon and the fact that it was identified as the reason for her cancer. Almost immediately KSL-TV sent a reporter to interview her - on the same day that a mitigation system was installed in her home. KSL-TV also interviewed a radon mitigation professional and