A dog trainer had no symptoms. A scan of his lungs found a terminal disease

When Christopher Kennedy went to have an X-ray before a routine surgery, he thought he would be in and out. Then a technician spotted scarring in his lungs.

Kennedy, 68 at the time, had never noticed any warning signs. He was a retired Air Force technician who exercised regularly and spent his time landscaping his backyard and training Bernese Mountain dogs to be hospital therapy animals.

After several tests, a pulmonologist gave him an alarming diagnosis: Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, or IPF. It's a type of lung disease with no known cause where scar tissue grows in the lungs and prevents oxygen from reaching the bloodstream, according to Dr. Panagis Galiatsatos, a medical spokesperson for the American Lung Association and pulmonologist at Johns Hopkins, who was not involved in Kennedy