Joye Lee-McNelis, the Head Coach of Southern Miss women’s basketball team, announced on Jan. 9 that she has been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer.
Lee-McNelis announced the news before Southern Miss played its second game against UAB on Saturday. She previously overcame a battle with adenocarcinoma in 2017, but realized something was wrong after contracting COVID-19 last November.
“I was really, really sick with COVID[,] and so that’s what honestly we thought it was,” Lee-McNelis said. “And then, I went in for my three-month checkup from having lung cancer previously and [they found] there was fluid in the pleural area of my lung, which [is] the lining of my lungs.