Ben Carlson (8:25)
Yeah, that one stood out to me, too. It is. It's such. I told you this the other day. It's such a bizarre emotion because, you know, millions and millions of other people have felt it, and some way or another, but it still feels like this. It's like the most personal emotion because of the person and the circumstances. And so it's like all the. All this stuff that, you know, you would imagine to feel the sadness and anger and kind of being numb and. But I've been going through that process for, like, a year now. So. John was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer about a year ago, but he actually had cancer before when he was in seventh grade. That's. That's the really hard part about this for my family, I think, is he went through it. It was a really terrible period in our lives. He got kind of a rare form of leukemia when he was young, actually. It was like we were on a Disney trip. I wrote about this. And the whole trip, he was, like, tired. And I was. I don't know, I was 10 years old, 9 years old, and I still remember this picture of him, like, laying on a bench at Disney taking a nap. And my mom obviously knew something was wrong. She's a nurse. But him. To the doctor, he was diagnosed. He needed a bone marrow transplant to survive, and I was the donor. I still have, like, the bumps on my hip that you can feel from, like, the huge needles they inject. And he survived. Cancer went into remission, and it was like, whoa, we dodged a bullet, right? But, like, that experience Shaped him for the rest of his life in, like, positive and somewhat negative ways. I almost equate him to being, like, a. I don't know if it's a 60, 40 portfolio or, like, a cynical might not be the right word, but, like, cynical optimist. Right? He had, like, both of these two competing things in his head of, like, I went through this once, but I just think that I'm unlucky with this stuff. And he always, like, halfway joked that he's going to die before age 50. And I was saying the other day, that asshole just always had to be right about these things, you know, just, like, annoyingly, right? So he had some other, like, illnesses and surgeries in his life, and he always kind of in the back of his head, felt like, oh, this just something about my body is not right. And so he got sick again. You know, it was almost like he was defeated. But he also, like, he, like, felt in his, like, his bones that it was coming or something. It was very. It was kind of a bizarre situation in that aspect of, like, he's been, like, preparing for this, this whole life. So that part of it is just, like, the hardest part for me. Watching him having this in the back of his head and then that realization coming true, that was tough. But then we went on this roller coaster where the prognosis looked pretty good. If we just have some chemo, things might be okay. And then the prognosis is really bad. At stage four, there's probably nothing you can do. The healthcare side of things is interesting to me because his initial diagnosis was basically like, well, this is the kind of thing where there's nothing you can do. We're going to give you chemo, and then you're probably going to. That'll help manage your pain until you pass away. And he kind of said, I've done chemo before. And he went through a month of chemo and lost a bunch of weight and lost all his hair and just was tired all the time and said, this is not how I'm going out. So he ended up calling these specialists all over the country and is like, I need to try something. And he got. Because his pancreatic cancer had some rare form of mutation or whatever. I'm not a medical person, so I don't know a doctor at a hospital who specializes in these new medications said, I'm willing to let you try my experimental medication. And he tried it, got off chemo, and it, like, it worked. It, like, stopped the cancer from spreading. He gained all the weight back he grew his hair out again and he looked like normal. You wouldn't know from the outside that he was sick. So he got this extra, like six months or so to kind of start riding his bike again and traveling and doing all this stuff. But he also, like, got all of his affairs in order. Right. You know, he stopped working at his job, obviously, and he could help prepare his family because he has a wife and three kids that he's leaving behind. So he got to, like, take all these months to have this second window that we didn't think he was going to have at first. So that part has been kind of a crazy rollercoaster too, just dealing with, are we going to do this? We're not going to do this. And what happened was he. They told him it was inoperable at first. Like, there's nothing you can do about this. The cancer is going to spread and you can't stop it. But with this new drug, it kind of stopped the spread. He found a surgeon in New York who said, I'm going to, I can do this. Let's operate. Because my brother said, I'm not just going to sit and wait till I die. I want to, like, thought swinging. If it's a 0.5% chance that something could extend my life a few years, I'm going to take it. So he went to New York. He had got a surgery, and I had one of those kind of like movie moments where we thought the surgery, we thought maybe like, worst case scenario, they do the surgery, it doesn't work. The cancer continues to spread, and then unfortunately, he passes away. It happened to be that he had complications during surgery and that's how he ended up passing. So he was in New York, had the surgery. I think it surprised a little, all of us, the surgeons especially, but it was one of these weird out of body experiences where my mother calls me and says, your brother is dying. And he's in the ICU and he's got. I don't know, he's going to die very soon. I need you to say goodbye to him. So we put it on speakerphone and, you know, he's got the breathing tube in and all the things on. And it's like you hear in the movies, I say goodbye to him and you hear all the machines start to go, you know, and like he could hear me, which was so. Okay. So that's the sad stuff. I wanted to get it out because I wanted to tell the story. But there's also been, you know, the best advice I've Gotten so far from this is just calling friends, having friends and family send stories and send pictures and talk about him from the positive side of things. And that's like the part of grief that is like, it's unfortunate. That's what has to happen to get you there. But, um, that part of it is, is like, oh, you realize how many people his life touched. And I hear from all these people all the time. So, like, again, the, the. All the outpouring of like, support and condolences and messages from people, people sharing their stories. That part of it, that part has been, has been helpful.
