It started with a headache. Then Lynda Bush’s speech began to slur, and her family told her she needed to get checked out.

A hospital scan found a mass in her brain. The ER doctors delivered the kind of news that flattens a family: stage IV lung cancer that had metastasized to her brain.

“They said it had metastasized from her lungs to her brain,” her daughter, Amy Walls, recalled. “We could almost see her fading away in that bed. Every day was worse than the day before.”

Bush was transferred to MedStar Franklin Square Medical Center, where she met neurosurgeon Dr. Jugal Shah. Shah looked at the scans and the diagnosis Bush had been given, and something didn’t sit right with him. The mass had the appearance of a tumor,........

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