Justin’s cancer journey series episode 1

Isabel, a health professional, shares her journey from her husband Justin's rare kidney cancer diagnosis in 2022 to his passing in 2024. She started a channel to help others navigate wellness amid life's challenges. The story unfolds from her mother's death to Justin's symptoms, the airport incident, ER visit, and the heartbreaking cancer diagnosis. Justin's health worries and pain led to the shocking discovery of cancer, disrupting their lives. Life's unpredictability and the need for resilience are highlighted. Hello everyone, thanks for joining for today's show. I'm Isabel and welcome to From Mudd. I have been a health and wellness professional in the field since 2012, however, everything changed for me in 2022 when I found out my husband, Justin, was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of kidney cancer. We had one child at the time, and four days after learning his cancer diagnosis, we found out I was pregnant with baby number two. Oh, and did I mention that we found out my husband had cancer the day we flew back from my mom's memorial service? So, yeah, life has been kind of chaotic the past few years, I'm sure a lot of people can relate to that. And we did unfortunately lose my husband, Justin, to cancer in July of 2024. And I wanted to share, start this channel to share my story and my expertise in the health and wellness field with others who might find it helpful or useful to either know our story or some of the wellness things I've learned over the years. And just the combination of life is hard sometimes. That is definitely something I've learned through our journey with Justin's cancer journey and us as a family. And also just as a health and wellness coach and educator over all of these years, everyone is going through something. Life gets hard, and it's really hard to stay well, especially during those times. So that's why I wanted to start this content creation journey that I'm on. And without further ado, I'm going to get going with today's episode, which is going to be the first episode in a series to kick everything off. My first series is basically the story of Justin and his, from diagnosis to his untimely death and how we handled that as a family and how everything went. So that's kind of what I'm going to start off with. So episode one is going to be basically starting from the point of what led us to get the diagnosis. So my mom passed away in December of 2021. I'm originally from South Florida, so my mom was still there. My brother was still there, and he was helping my mom through everything. She was living with my grandparents. My grandpa, her dad, actually passed the same year as her, but he passed in January, and she passed in December. So my grandpa had already passed, and she was with my grandma living at her house. And then, yeah, so my brother was there. She died of heart failure and kidney failure. So once that cascade of events after she got COVID, she passed in December. Five months later, we were planning to go to Florida just to do a small memorial with me and Justin, and I don't know if I mentioned Justin's my husband. Yeah, I think I did. So it was Justin, me, and my brother. And we were planning to go back to Florida for a little memorial service, just me and Justin and my brother and my son, who was, let's see, he would have been, yeah, like one and a half, almost two, yeah, he would have been almost two at the time. So we all went back for the memorial. That went really well. It was very nice. We went to the Keys. We set her free, and we did some flower arrangements for her, and floated those off in the ocean in her honor. We laid her, we spread her ashes along with her little doggie, so it was a very nice trip. I love the Keys, so it was all going great until we were at Fort Lauderdale Airport, Fort Lauderdale Airport. We were at Fort Lauderdale Airport. We were at Fort Lauderdale Airport waiting to board our flight, and because our son was so little, we were able to board first, so we were standing in line waiting to be let on with the early boarders. Justin had to go to the restroom. He goes to the restroom. He comes back. He kind of has a worried look on his face, and he tells me that he peed blood. Now Justin had been through the years, especially the most recent years, like the previous five to seven years, when he first developed panic disorder, where he would experience panic attacks sometimes, anxiety attacks. He generally had like experiencing panic when it was related to physical things he would experience, like if we were working out and his heart rate would go up, it would kind of cause this slew of thoughts and worries that then became a panic attack. Not every time, and by that time he had developed a lot of tools and coping for that. The reason I mention that is because he's always been, he was always somebody who worried about his health and would worry if there was any little thing off with his health. So I knew he would be freaking out when he told me that he peed blood. So I try to stay cool, and especially since I'm in the field adjacent, I'm not a medical person, but I am often working with a lot of medical people. I tend to know a lot of things about conditions, things that you can do to manage conditions. I come into contact with a lot of just medical conditions in general, and I have like a basic understanding of a lot of different stuff, like especially common things. So when he was describing the peeing blood, my first internal thought was like, oh shit, that's not great, but let's not freak out. We don't know anything yet. There's a lot of different reasons why someone might pee blood. In my head, I pictured it as pee with like a little tinge of blood in the toilet or something like that, and yeah, this might be a little graphic for people. I guess I should have given a bit of a disclaimer, but I mean, I don't think it's that bad. Anyway, he showed me a video of him peeing blood, and it was straight blood. It did not look like pee with a little blood. It looked like thick, bloody blood coming out of pee, and I think he got that video. The first time he saw it, he probably was like, whoa, what the F? Then he did it again on the plane, and he was able to film it, and then he showed it to me, and yeah, that kind of changed how I was thinking about it, but again, I'm trying to remain calm because I know he's going to freak out if I start freaking out about it even more than he is already freaking out about it because I know him, and I know how he's going to freak out about this, but when I saw that video, I was like, whoa, that is all blood, so I was like, yeah, you know, it's not good. There's definitely something wrong, but you know, maybe it's kidney stones. Maybe it's this and that. Maybe it's an infection. We just don't know. Let's not panic until we talk to the doctors, so he, at that point, was also starting to develop this pain in his kidneys. You know, at the time, we still didn't know what was what, but in that area, and I was like, oh, it's like where your kidneys are. Again, I'm not a doctor, but I know some things about some things. So, his kidneys were starting to kind of like throb and become painful, so I thought, maybe it's kidney stones, you know. That's probably what it is. I don't know. The plane ride, so we had a flight from Fort Lauderdale to Houston, I think, and then Houston to Phoenix, where we were living at the time. So, from Fort Lauderdale to Houston, it was pretty dang miserable. He couldn't barely focus on anything other than the pain he was in and the worries. He literally said, it's cancer. This is cancer. I'm like, shut up, dude. No, it's not. You're like a healthy 30, let's see, he would have been 35, 40-something years old, and 35 or something at the time, 2021. Yeah, so he was like 35 or something, oh no, he was 37 when he was diagnosed, I believe. Yeah, he was 37 when he was diagnosed, because he passed when he was 39, so I believe he was 37. I'm like, you're a healthy 37-year-old. Your grandpa is like, well, he's 99 now, so at that time, he would have been 96 or something like that. Your grandpa's like 96. His dad lived to 103. You are not going to have cancer young. Stop saying stuff like that, because he would do stuff, he would over-worry, so it wasn't like it was ever cancer before. You just happened to be right this time. So, I'm like, it's not cancer. It's probably just kidney stones. You need to do your calming activities. Go into your mind and pull out all your tools now. Anyway, the flight was miserable. I couldn't help him too much, because I was focused on the one-and-a-half-year-old, very active one-and-a-half-year-old on my lap on the plane. Then we had a layover and a transfer, and it was all a mess. We were running through. Again, he's in pain. I've got my kid on my hip, and we've got the stroller and all this stuff. We're dragging through the airport. We can't find where we're going. Things have moved to just whatever. It was chaotic. We get to our spot. We finish the leg to Phoenix. We land. His mom comes to get us. Justin's mom comes to get us from the airport. We let her know what's been happening, and she takes us directly to the ER. She takes our son and stays home with him while I'm with Justin at the ER. We get in. We're just waiting in the waiting room. It's going to be a long time. So Justin's like, you can just go back and take care of our boy, because my mom needs to get home, blah, blah, blah. He sends me off to go back home and take care of our baby. He stays and waits to be called back, or maybe he was called back. I can't remember if he was already called back or he was soon to be called back. He did triage, and he's just waiting to be called back. He gets called back. He's keeping me updated. It's now getting into, I'll just fast forward a little. It's now getting into the evening hours. We still haven't heard. They do CTs. They're really packed, and it's taken a long time to get the CT results back. Then I get a call at 11 p.m. or midnight, something like that. I get a call, and he was like, hey, so I have to tell you something. They pulled me into the room to talk to me about my results, and I knew it was going to be bad, because they were telling everybody what was going on with them out loud in the triage area. It's cancer, and I was like, shut the F up, dude. Don't mess with me like that. My initial response was like, I don't believe you, because he was a trickster. He used to prank and trick and joke all the time. He wouldn't typically do jokes like that. When he first said it, I didn't believe him, but he kept being like, no, Izzy, this is what it is. They're telling me I have a tumor on my kidneys the size of a baseball. That was the first time we heard. I guess they also were like, we don't know what it is. At that time, they still didn't know it was cancer, but it was a foreign growth that was not supposed to be there. They definitely identified that because of the CT scan. I forgot to say, when we first got there, I want to say I did leave when he was already in triage. Yes, yes, I remember now. We were in triage. We were sitting together. He was describing what he was experiencing, and they were like, oh, yeah, classic kidney stone symptoms. So they were very confident as well that it was kidney stones. They gave him the med that is like the typical kidney stone treatment med, and that gave him some relief. So again, we were kind of like, oh, yeah, it seems like it's kidney stones. We were pretty, we were kind of calming down, you know. Then Justin was like, yeah, go ahead and leave. So then I left. Okay, blah, blah, blah. He calls me at 11. He tells me that. Yeah, so we find out because of the CT scans, and this is how from my understanding over the course of the two years that Justin was going through his cancer, that is typically how people find out they have kidney cancer is they get a CT scan for something unrelated, and then it shows up. Otherwise, a kidney cancer is not picked up on PET scans. There's no, well, I don't know if that's true. I want to say that's true. I should probably verify that. I'm sorry. If you're listening, verify that. But I believe it's not, you can't pick it up on PET scans, and there's no blood draw that picks it up. Typically, people find out they have kidney cancer because there is a growth that is identified on a CT scan, usually for an unrelated issue. So we find out about the baseball-sized tumor on his kidney, which they weren't calling it a tumor at the time. I think they were probably just saying it's a growth, and we need more testing to find out what it is. So he's admitted, of course. They do a ton of imaging, a bunch of stuff comes back. The local, would it be oncologist? No, I think they were going with an endocrinologist at the time, and he was in there for like four days, and the endocrinologist or whoever they had, I think it was an endocrinologist or maybe it was a nephrologist, a kidney specialist, and they were basically like, yeah, but it looks kind of isolated. It looks like if it is cancerous, you have youth on your side, you're young, you're otherwise healthy, it seems kind of isolated, maybe it will be something pretty easy to treat. So they were kind of making us feel a little bit better. But this whole time, Justin was like, nope, I know it's going to be bad. It's going to be bad. He was always a bit of a pessimist, always a bit of an optimist, and I just am. I still am. That's just who I am. That's just who he was. And yeah, he would probably say he's not a pessimist. He'd probably say he's a realist or something like that. But anyway, so we basically learned that we need to go for further testing. He needs to go in to see this other doctor. I can't remember his name and whatever. That's not important, but he's a blood oncology, hematology, something else. Maybe I'm missing one more thing, but oncology, hematology, for sure. Naturally, I think that's it. And we were in, oh yeah, we were already in Phoenix. So yeah, so this would have been in the Phoenix area. And we were in Western Phoenix specifically. We were in Surprise. So basically, we leave the hospital. That next day, we found out that I was pregnant. It's like my mom dies, my husband gets cancer, and now I'm pregnant. Also, my mother-in-law has her own cancer journey. And she has her own stuff going on. So her cancer's different, but it's a factor in the mix. So we kind of had all these things going on. And yeah, so we find out I'm pregnant. And right when I found out I was pregnant, Justin was like, I'm going to die. Because basically, the baby's coming in to replace me. Which he didn't have any bad feelings towards the baby. In fact, our baby that came at that moment, we had been trying for 10 months to get pregnant, for me to get pregnant, to have our second baby. And there was, I'll explain that story another time. But it was a miracle. I mean, it's always a miracle. But it was a serious, divinely timed miracle. Because moving forward, the treatments and things that were going to be done to Justin, I don't think a sperm could have survived, honestly. He had so much radiation done. So this was like, just meant to be. She was meant to come to us. I think of her as like a little Wonder Woman spirit, just blasting through all the challenges. And just meant to be here at this time. And she was the light bringer. She brought so much light to such an otherwise dark situation. And she gave us something to appreciate and like, look forward to. And gave something more for Justin to fight for. So yeah. So we found out she was coming. She was due on February 14th of 2023. So she was a Valentine's baby. She was definitely a little love light warrior spirit coming towards us. Yeah. So basically, four days later, we found out I'm pregnant. We still, at this point, don't know what type of cancer he has. We just know that, you know, if there's two categories of it's good or it's bad, it's in the it's bad category. We just didn't know to what degree it was going to be bad. So I think it was later that week, maybe four days after that or so, we had our appointment with the specialist, the oncology hematology specialist there. That was pretty awful. I just remember, of course, you know, you're two young people. You have a little one at home. Your wife is pregnant, newly pregnant. You're walking into this facility where there's nobody our age. Um, the doctor was very cold and sometimes making like weird jokes that were not funny. And we were just because like, we're sensitive right now, like he just found out. But basically he told us that he has, um, is he the one who told us the first time? Yeah. He's the one who told us what kind of cancer he has, which is, uh, uh. Okay. He has, uh, he had renal cell carcinoma with rhabdoid features. I believe that is when we found that out. So renal cell, oh, non-clear cell, renal cell carcinoma with rhabdoid features. So if I'm not mistaken, the non-clear cell is already the version of kidney cancer that you don't want. And the, um, rhabdoid features was the specific mutation that made it particularly aggressive. And it was stage four upon diagnosis. And Justin had some signs before, maybe the last episode I'll, I'll do a backtrack of like, if I can track what signs there were. Um, but he didn't have anything. Yeah. He, he basically like it, it grew very rapidly. It was a rapid growing cancer. Um, yeah, it was stage four upon diagnosis. The, I think if you catch kidney cancer early, like most cancers, if you can catch it in the early stages, it's much easier to treat and you have so many more options, but kidney cancer is just one of those cancers that you don't tend to find it early. And there's just not a lot of great treatments for it. So it's definitely not the cancer that you want to get if you're going to have cancer. I don't remember if at that point, no, I don't think we had all the imaging done yet at that point, or we definitely weren't aware of what was going on at that point. So at that point we were being sent, sorry I said at that point so many times, but, um, anyway, after that, we were recommended to go to one of those doctor's colleagues. And we knew at that point, we, we knew that we wanted to, we knew that we needed to get into Mayo Clinic. We were in Phoenix. We were close to Mayo Clinic. That was going to be one of our best local options for cancer treatment. So we already knew we wanted to leave that oncologist. But anyway, that oncologist sent us, oh, maybe we didn't know Mayo Clinic yet. Sorry, I'm jumping around. I'm not scripted right now. I'm just kind of going off, offhand of what I remember. So we left that oncologist. He sent us to another medical person in the network. I think we were in Banner at the time. So in the Banner network, we went to somebody else who was more specialized in like abdominal-based cancers and who kind of specialized. We went to him. We had all the imaging. He looked over all the imaging with us. That was another really scary appointment. And basically, that's when we kind of really like soaked up and took in how bad it was. Because that doctor basically told us like, wow, he's like, this is very extensive. This may not be operable. He's like, it is a bunch of lymph all in the external, all in the abdominal cavity. So it's just all in the tissue and all in the mix, a bunch of cancerous lymph along the backside of his abdominal wall. And plus that baseball-sized tumor, which is the primary tumor that is on the kidney. Typically, if you find the cancer, this is what we were told, if you find this type of cancer early and it hasn't spread into the lymph that way, if it's just localized on the kidney, they typically remove it and usually take the kidney too. That was not an option for Justin because even if you take that primary tumor, there was so much of it in the lymph. He showed us all the views of the imaging. He was like, all of this, that's just all cancer stuff. You can't cut that out. The best thing you can do is a systematic approach to reduce the amount there. If you can get it small enough that it's operable, then that's an option. But you would have to respond well to treatment. So that was a very difficult appointment. That was a very hard. We didn't have a hopeful feeling after that. I mean, I still am always going to be like, well, there's going to be something, there's going to be, we still don't know everything. Anyone who's been through a cancer journey with somebody or on their own and you have support around you or not, you know that the early part of finding out about your cancer or your loved one's cancer is filled with a ton of unknowns. It's, there's so much information yet to come and you have to wait for all the information to come so you can really talk about a prognosis, a treatment plan. Where are we going from here? What are the options? We were so early in that journey that we still didn't have all of that yet. But that was, especially for Justin, that was a very defeating feeling. Because yeah, that doctor was like, this is really bad. This is really bad. This is one of the worst I've ever seen. So, so he basically encouraged, I think he did encourage us to go to Mayo. Was he the one who encouraged? He might have been. He might have been the one who said, go to Mayo Clinic. So then we tried to get in at Mayo Clinic. Of course, they're packed. But we're trying to, you know, get the images sent to oncology, to the kidney doctor, to all of them, whatever. We tried to get it, you know, in front of their board. We managed to call enough people and bother enough people and let them know like, this is a healthy 37-year-old with this type of extended amount of cancer in his body. And, you know, I think because of his age, I think he got in quicker because it's like, oh, he has a, you know, maybe has a little more chance of survival. So eventually we get in at Mayo Clinic. Justin gets in with the main kidney cancer specialist, or they all work great there. We had an amazing experience at Mayo Clinic. And so, whoops, sorry. So yeah, we get to Mayo Clinic. We meet with the doctor. Let's see, how was that first meeting? I actually have my notes on it. Okay, again, so I paused and went to go look up my notes that whenever we would have these appointments, I would take notes on my phone and I would write out my questions and also just take notes of whatever he told us. So, or whatever the doctors told us. So, yeah, just looking at all of those things. Some of the main points I'm noticing, if I skip to the first time we met with the Mayo Clinic folks, and it was Dr. Ho. And he was great. We, he was a little, you know, cold at times, but he was excellent at what he did, and Justin really trusted him. We had him most of the time, and then we did have a new doctor towards the end of Justin's life, but we loved Dr. Ho. He seemed super knowledgeable. He was not in any way, he was very knowledgeable about this particular type of cancer as well. So, he made us feel more confident that he knew what he was doing. So, when Justin, when we first spoke with Dr. Ho, he came in, he knew what the plan was. He was like, this is what we're going to do. We're going to try immunotherapy. There's a 50% chance it will shrink. There's a 1 in 10 chance it will get rid of everything. Four cycles of it will give us a good idea. The immunotherapy is two to four cycles. Or no, I'm sorry, it'll basically, he said within two to four cycles, that's when we start to see more issues. But basically, it goes in your vein, so it's like chemotherapy. He had to come to the Mayo Clinic every three weeks for four cycles of that. It was two different drugs that would be infused, and then basically, yeah, you got a 50% chance that it works and shrinks things. So, my thinking was like, yeah, this is going to work. Let's positive think this. You know, let's manifest this. He said this is the most aggressive option. Justin, he said, you're young. This is a very aggressive cancer, but because of your age, we want to go for the 1 out of 10, so we want to go hard. It's like we're going to throw everything at it. When I asked him, like, do people tend to do better when they're younger with this, and I remember he was like, not necessarily. This is not really one of those things where you have a lot of, it really is just 50%. It's a luck of the draw. There's nothing that really raises that. They just wanted to go hard because he was young, and his body could take it in their eyes. He was young and otherwise healthy. So, the plan was immunotherapy first, manage the side effects, stay hydrated, good hygiene, hand cleaning, avoiding getting any infections, probiotics. These are things that they were kind of encouraging at the Mayo Clinic for him to do. If after immunotherapy, we would reassess. If that was successful, we would reassess to see if surgery was an option. So, again, when they're telling me these things, I tend to think the most positive thing is going to happen. That's just the way my brain works initially when we don't know the truth yet, or when it's just a let's see what happens. Well, let's think positively because that's just what I do. Again, Justin was like, I think he just didn't want it. He was like, let's just see. I don't know. He's like, it's bad. Okay, so then, yeah, so then his infusions were half days, and Justin was still working during this time. So, when he first got diagnosed, he worked for, oh, let's see. It must have been 2022. That was in June 2022, and then he probably stopped working in the following year, in 2023. Yeah, yeah, because by the time my daughter came, he was already not working. So, yeah, not too long after that, he stopped working with doctor's orders and everything. So, yeah, he said the bleeding might get worse. Let's see. When we ask like what causes this type of cancer, it's kind of like an unknown. It's an environmental. He said typically it's related to an environmental toxin. Like he said, a lot of military folks who worked around like fracking sites were showing up with this type of cancer. Otherwise, that's pretty much it. But he did kind of say like if you have a lot of cancer in your family, it's more of a matter of when, not if. It's just that, and even though Justin's dad's side lives along, besides his dad, his dad actually passed from cardiac arrest in March of 2020. But his mom's, but otherwise his grandpa is almost 100 at this point, and his dad, Justin's great-grandpa lived to 103. So, they have the longevity on that side for the older generations. Oh, and his grandpa, who's almost 100, his siblings all lived to 98. Both of his siblings lived to 98 as well. So, they have the genes for a long life on that side. However, his mom's side, like I mentioned, she has her own cancer journey, lymphoma, leukemia. And then her parents had two run-ins with cancer, breast cancer and breast cancer. And then his grandpa on his mom's side, he had prostate cancer and then lung cancer, which is what took his life in 2017. So, it was like you have a lot of cancer on that one side. So, it's kind of like your chances of experiencing that are much higher. It's just that Justin is now the youngest person in the family to have had cancer. So, he said, he was like, there's nothing you did. There's nothing you could have done. You know, this is just, unfortunately, the less of the draw of your genetics right now and that we didn't catch it earlier. He did tell us that the cancer, especially the primary tumor, it tends to grow about one centimeter per month. So, it had probably been growing for the previous six months because that was about the size when we found it. So, that's how quickly it did start to proliferate. Yeah. So, that was our first meeting with Dr. Ho. Justin started doing his cancer treatments and his immunotherapies and it wasn't going well. Well, he was tolerating it fine, but it wasn't making the big impact on his imaging that then we would have hoped. You know, we would have hoped it would have shown a lot more decrease. I think it basically kind of, well, yeah, he said, so that was in June and then I have notes from September that say this particular immunotherapy combo is not working. They're going to continue with, I think, two of the meds or one of them with immunotherapy and they were going to add some new pill form therapies. So, at that point, and then they also started to bring in palliative care at that point because the new meds that he was going to bring was Cabo, what is it called? Oh, gosh, I forget what the name is. I'd have to go find it. But, oh, Cabozentamum, that's what I wrote down. So, that is very hard on the body. So, they wanted to bring in palliative care to help manage the side effects from all of the meds. So, that was the next plan, that by October, they were going to add in those meds and they were going to change the immunotherapy, reduce, take away one med and keep the other or take away one and keep two. I can't remember which combination of stuff it was. Every time you're, you know, I'm sure a lot of cancer journey folks can relate to this, but when you're waiting in between treatment and imaging, it's just torture. It's just torture. You're just waiting to see, you know, like just that waiting to know what the next imaging is going to say is terrifying and exhausting and just a constant feeling of dread. And since we found out about this, like especially that first year, but really the whole time, oh, and I don't think I mentioned it, but the first meeting we had in June with Dr. Ho, he did give us a prognosis of two to five years and he told us eventually, because Justin was so scared he wasn't going to get to see his baby girl be born, he did tell us like, you're going to make it. Eventually, he's like, you're going to make it to see your daughter be born. I will tell you when you have less than six months to live. So, right now, you know, you're good. You're going to make it to see your little girl. That was like everything to Justin at that time. And yeah, so we actually went on a cruise, you know, because we were kind of like, well, who knows what's coming right now. Justin feels good. I'm, you know, approaching 20 weeks. When I went on the cruise, I was at their max limit of pregnancy. I was 20 weeks. So, this might be, who knows, this might honestly be our last trip. We didn't talk like that. Justin couldn't really handle that kind of definitive death talk kind of stuff, or this could be the last blah, blah, blah. So, we didn't talk like that, but that was the underlying feeling of like, we don't know if we'll be able to travel. And Justin and I loved traveling. Justin was pretty well traveled at that point. And I had traveled a bit and we had traveled a bit together. And we always envisioned that for our lives with me and the kids and him and just going around the world and showing them the world. And, you know, we were adventurers. So, it was like, well, let's try and squeeze in a cruise right now because who knows what the future brings with the new medication and with me being pregnant, you know, who knows when we could do these kinds of things again. And then we'll have two kids and blah, blah, blah. So, yeah, we decided to take that opportunity and go on a fun adventure. And then his plan was to start the new Med Cabo once we got back. That's the name of the Med Cabo. It has a long name, so we always called it Cabo. And then, yeah, so then, let's see, we get back, he starts the Cabo. And I think he responded pretty well to it. Yeah, he responded pretty well to it. He didn't have the really horrible side effects that they warned us about, thankfully. So, he was responding pretty well to it. Let's see, I think everything was physically fine for him. Oh, didn't he have that spinal? Yeah, I think that he, that first year he had to have a couple lesions removed from his spine. Yeah, wait, no, not lesions, like little growths. I believe that was it. Yeah, because it wouldn't have been that next year. It was that first year. So, August of 2022, they removed, they had to cut vertically that upper part of his spine, cut some stuff out, and then I think they did radiation, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, yeah, so that's right. He did that, and then he, and then he went back. So, yeah, he found out, we found out what the plan was. They did the back surgery. That was all right off the bat, and I would say, you know, that first year, so 2022, that was the first year. My next episode, I'll go into the second year, 2023, and then after that, 2024 was his last year, and so, yeah, I'll kind of do it like that. So, that first year, like mentally, was very difficult for Justin, and yeah, I mean, he was reckoning with his mortality and the fact that, you know, he would be leaving his babies, leaving me, his wife, and we were together. By the time he passed, we were a couple for 13 years, and we had been friends for three years prior, like best friends and roommates, so like we had been in each other's lives 16 years, loving each other on different levels for 16 years by the time he passed. So, he would be leaving, you know, the life that we had been building for the past 16 years, 13 years, and finally became a dad and finally got our second baby, and all he wanted in life was to be a dad. That was his dream in life. You know, he was fortunate to have great jobs, and he loved his, he loved where he left off, you know, and what he achieved with his work, but he, the only thing he loved and really wanted out of life was to be a dad, and he did accomplish that, but we pictured him being able to do that for the kids' lives for much longer than what we got, so just grieving that and accepting that, and his mom was a bit of a mess as well, just, again, her own grieving. She just, she lost her husband and her mom the same year, and then now she's got a son with cancer who, you know, just like her, and, but his cancer is very aggressive and imminently affecting his ability to survive, so she was not holding it together, so I was the only one holding it together, really, I felt, so I didn't have a ton of, I felt like I was supporting everybody emotionally, meanwhile taking care of a young toddler, meanwhile being pregnant, so, yeah, it was a lot. It was a lot, so that first year, it was a lot of, like, emotional wreckage, emotional chaos, and as well as some physical things going on, because he met, he, I think he handled the immunotherapy pretty well. I don't think there was a lot of discomfort for him yet, maybe just some, like, basic, you know, headaches and things like that, but nothing major yet. Then he did have that back surgery, which was pretty intense and required radiation and stuff, so that was intense, but he was still functioning the same. He was still able to do a lot of things, pretty much act as normal, you know, he would get tired more, and he would need to rest more, but for the most part, it was, like, really the mental battle, because he was just starting to, I could not withstand hearing him do the, if I'm gone, if I leave, when I die, you know, if I die early, like, I need you to do this, I need you to do that, he'd be like, you know, he's trying to tell me things about the house, you know, the, do you know how to reset the circuit breaker, do you know how to turn on the sprinklers, do you know how to set the pool pump, you know, he's quizzing me on all these things, and I'm like, I, you're still here, I don't need you to do this right now, and I kind of can't handle it, but it was a lot of that, where he'd be like, you have to promise me one thing, if I, you know, go because of this really soon, like, you need to promise me that you will always keep my memory alive with the kids, and that they will always know who I am, and they will always know how much their dad loved them, and I said, of course I'm going to do that, of course I'm going to do that. But I couldn't handle talking about that stuff at that point, couldn't handle talking about him not being with us when my baby wasn't even born yet, she was barely even half-baked, so like, couldn't even think about that. And on top of it, we just, we still had options, and he was still doing okay with the treatments so far, it wasn't like great improvements, but it was, I think mostly not getting worse, I don't know, it's hard to remember at the time, but I just, I was still holding on to hope, I remember when I asked Dr. Ho, what is the longest you've seen someone live with this, and he said 18 years, and I thought in my mind, well that's, we're going to have at least that, Justin's going to, you know, supersede that, he's going to surpass that, you know, Justin's a lucky person, he's always had what I would call juicy luck, which I'll explain another time, but his nickname in college, from me and my friend Carly, who we were all roommates, that's how we met Justin, we all called him Juicy, and so I was like, I always would say you have juicy luck, you'd get good parking spaces, he would win things, like, I don't know, slot machines, like he just had some type of luck, so I'm like, you have juicy luck, this is going to, you know, you're going to, it's going to come through, and I thought, you know, he's healthy, he has these longevity genes with him, he's going to make it much longer than the doctor is proposing, so, yeah, unfortunately, I was wrong, because he did pass right in that window of the prognosis, he was from two to five years of typical survival, so he passed just a little beyond that two-year mark, so, I'm sorry, I'm sniffling now, because I started crying, but anyway, so that pretty much wraps up that first year, from when we found out, to basically the end of the year, you know, we tried to do as many fun things as we could, you know, we tried to just muddle through, basically, and the whole time, you know, we had our baby to look forward to, so that was really, I called her the light bringer for a long time, because that was what she was, she was the light in the darkness, she was the, you know, the light we had to look forward to, the thing we were looking forward to, and we were so grateful for, so, that's going to wrap me up for today, as always, I want to end these episodes by expressing my deep gratitude, I want to say thank you to anyone who's listening, my closest friends and family are probably the primary people listening right now, but all of you who've been through this journey with me, or know my story, and are in my life now, or anyone listening, thank you, thank you for being here with me as I kind of rebuild my and my kids' lives after losing Justin, I am so grateful I get to experience life here on earth, even though, on one hand, it can be some of the most painful and saddest things we can experience here on earth, as earthlings, but alongside the most beautiful and amazing experiences, they're all happening at the same time, and we're very fortunate to be able to experience the levels of love that come with all of that, and that, my friends, is the epitome of the human experience, and I wish you all inner peace and inner strength, blessings, abundance, great health, and safety for you and yours, take care, bye.