Emmy Producer Discovers Stage 3 Cancer After Prenuvo Body Scan (Exclusive)

Dionne Harman was feeling perfectly fine in 2023 — until a full body scan led to a shocking discovery: She had stage 3 lung cancer.

It was an Instagram post by Kim Kardashian that prompted her to get checked out. “I think she posted a selfie in scrubs in front of the [Prenuvo] machine,” Harmon recalls. But it was a barrage of negative comments that made her stop scrolling and take notice. “People were like, ‘Oh my God, she’s so tone deaf. People can’t afford to get this done, how dare she.’ ”

Meanwhile, “I was like, ‘What the hell is Prenuvo?’ I literally looked it up right then,” Harmom says.

The Emmy producer — alongside fiancé Jesse Collins, whose namesake company orchestrates The Emmys, the Super Bowl Halftime Show and more — found herself curiously digging into Prenuvo, a relatively new company offering advanced technology MRI scans.

Priced between $2,500 and $4,500 for a full body scan, it’s not cheap, but Prenuvo claims to offer people the chance to take a deeper look into what’s going on in their bodies, hopefully in time to catch serious issues before it’s too late.

“There was like a 3 to 4 month wait before we could get an appointment,” says Harmon of herself and her fiancé. At the time, she says she was more concerned with his health. “We both work hard and don’t always take care of ourselves the way we should. And sad to say, several of our friends have dropped dead of heart attacks because it’s a high-stress world. Jesse started his own company after his boss, John Cossette, died of a massive heart attack, so there’s always been that fear.” 

After both getting the scan back in March of 2024, “Jesse was a perfect picture of health,” says Harmon. “He, like, needed to work on his posture, but other than that everything was good.”

Their results couldn’t have been more different.

Harmon learned her scan had an alarming and unusual finding. “’There appears to be a pretty large mass in your right lung, and you need to call a pulmonologist as soon as possible’,” she says she was told. “I’m like, ‘What? What do you mean? What’s a pulmonologist?’ ”

She made an appointment right away. “At first, the pulmonologist gave me some s—, saying how these new machines aren’t that great and that it might be a mistake,” she recalls. But after a chest X-ray she was immediately sent to a radiologist for a PET/CT scan. That’s when she was told she needed a biopsy.

It wasn’t until a meeting with USC’s Dr. Graeme Rosenberg, a professor and thoracic surgeon at Keck Medicine in Los Angeles, that Harmon was diagnosed with lung cancer.

“I think lung cancer is really misunderstood,” Rosenberg tells PEOPLE. “Many people think it’s a smoker’s disease, and that’s very far from the truth. Most lung cancers are found by accident in the non-smoking population.” That was the case with Harmon.

“Lung cancer is usually asymptomatic until it’s at an advanced stage, where it’s either invaded into the chest wall and causing pain or is so invasive that there is blood or obstruction of the airways that leads to a pneumonia,” Rosenberg says.

Luckily Harmon, who was asymptomatic, hadn’t reached that point. But upon surgery, which was done with the use of a doctor-controlled robotic arm via a state-of-the-art machine called The Da Vinci, Rosenberg found that what had originally presented as stage 1 or 2 lung cancer was actually stage 3. 

“There were a couple of surprises in her pathology, including a lymph node with a tiny microscopic metastatic nodule,” explains Rosenberg. “We were really fortunate to have gotten her into our team at USC quickly so that she was operated on swiftly, because the fear is that lung cancer spreads to the next train stop over in terms of lymph nodes.” 

Or as Harmon’s pulmonologist told her, “‘If you had found this six months later, we’d be talking about how to make the rest of your life comfortable’,” she recalls. “I would’ve died, for sure.” 

The surgery was successful. Recovery, however, was hard. 

“I’m fiercely independent, like Type-A energy, and I don’t like people helping me. My mom having to help me in the bathroom and wipe me was insane,” she recalls. As for her fiancé, “the way that he really just stepped up and was there, keeping all the balls in the air, just being that rock…It was amazing how he instantly went into support mode. Nothing mattered besides making sure I was okay and got through this.” 

Harmon had mentally prepared herself for rounds of chemotherapy and radiation. But following surgery, she learned that she qualified for a much less taxing drug therapy that successfully targets the exact mutation of her tumor. Now a year and a half out, “I’m basically halfway through taking a pill a day for three years, and every six months I get lung scans. Everything has been clear.” 

Earlier this year, she decided to celebrate her recovery in a major way. “I was like, ‘I’m going to run the Paris marathon’,” she says, “just to prove to myself that I could, a year after my surgery and with [only a portion] of my right lung.” 

Harmon did just that, with her fiancé and family cheering her on from the sidelines. “She’s a remarkable woman,” says Rosenberg. “After surgery, she was eating healthy, she was asking the right questions, and she was being really proactive.”

He and Harmon have even joined forces to launch a lung cancer awareness foundation, encouraging early screenings. 

In all, “it’s been a crazy experience,” she says. A full circle moment came earlier this year when she was able to personally thank Kim Kardashian for the role she unknowingly played. 

“My fiancé mentioned my story to Kim’s publicist and she was like, ‘I’m going to text her right now!’ Next thing we know she made a post about it. It was so great to be able to thank her personally. We ended up sending her this huge floral arrangement and she was very, very sweet.” 

“Thank you @jessecollinsent and @dionnenicoleharmon for sharing your story and allowing me to share it in hopes of saving lives,” Kardashian shares with PEOPLE of what she wrote to the couple after learning of Harmon’s story. “While Prenuvo may not be accessible to everyone it has been life-changing for many I know. Your health is your greatest wealth and I can’t imagine a more meaningful investment for yourself and your loved ones.”

Adds Harmon, “It felt good to say to her, ‘Somebody tried to tear you down, but it actually ended up working in the reverse and saving my life, so thank you for posting’.” 

These days, Harmon is all about paying it forward and passing the message. “All of my friends have now gotten Prenuvo. Most people have been great, and a couple have found things that they should deal with and they’re in front of it, so that’s been really amazing.”

But more than anything, she has a whole new outlook on life. “It still feels surreal,” she says of all she’s been through. “It made me change my life. I used to work like a crazy person. It really helped me learn to step back and figure out what’s really important. I learned to delegate, to say ‘no’, and just focus more on my friends and family.”