A Couple on Edge

Dr. Oz told Wendie that in her first medical screenings, they found a shadow on her lung scan. He asked her to submit to a second screening with a specialist, Dr. Austin of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.

"If you weren't a smoker, we wouldn't worry that much about that," Dr. Oz says to Wendie. "But because you're a smoker, these kinds of shadows really concern us, and we started thinking about lung cancer. ... I'm hoping that's not the case, but I don't want to mislead you. If I thought it was nothing, we wouldn't do the scan."

After running the new tests, Dr. Austin has good news. "Her lungs are gorgeous; everything is fine," he says. "You had a little infection in the lung, and it's gone."

When she gets the results, Dr. Oz says he is struck by Wendie's reaction. "You just seemed numbed," he says. "I don't think that you either took it seriously or really were able to grasp the magnitude of how this changed your life. Instead of having to cope with lung cancer as a young woman, you actually had a whole second chance."

"I know how to disassociate and not be with myself at times," Wendie says. "That's how I cope. It's a survival skill for me."

Wendie says she uses this coping mechanism in her marriage too.