Woman Recalls 1st Sign She Had Stage 4 Non-Smoking Lung Cancer: 'I Was Floored'

As Tania Rodrigues drove to work one morning in January 2024, something unusual happened with her vision.

“All of a sudden, I was looking through a kaleidoscope or perhaps like a fly’s eye,” the 66-year-old from Marin County, California, tells TODAY.com. “Everything that was in front of me on the road was now in multiples.”

For about 20 years, Tania Rodrigues practiced taekwondo and is a second dan black belt. She took a break while busy with work and life but since being diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, she started practicing again. Courtesy Tania Rodrigues

Worried, Rodrigues visited the emergency room, where she underwent an MRI and a CT scan. Doctors soon knew what caused Rodrigues’ fractured vision.

“He said, ‘You have Stage 4 lung cancer with two brain (metastases),” she says