Crafting Survival
Defying Odds and Embracing Hope
Reunited after 22 years, we discover astonishing coincidences and shared experiences that brought us back into each other's lives. From intense high school athletics to the heartbreaking losses of siblings to addiction, our parallel journeys are nothing short of remarkable. A simple Facebook post in 2016 rekindled our bond, leading to deep conversations about a cancer journey and work in cancer diagnostics. Join us as we recount how these serendipitous moments have woven our lives together once more.
In our final chapters, we dive into the emotional depths of family and survival. Planning a wedding to honor a father battling melanoma on 2/22/22, and cherishing memories of summers with a beloved grandmother, we explore the essence of family bonds. We also bring you an incredible story of hope: a loved one defying a grim cancer prognosis through determined, proactive medical intervention. Celebrate with us as we highlight the extraordinary strength and resilience that defines our shared journey. Tune in weekly and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook for more inspiring stories.
Reunited after 22 years, we discover astonishing coincidences and shared experiences that brought us back into each other's lives. From intense high school athletics to the heartbreaking losses of siblings to addiction, our parallel journeys are nothing short of remarkable. A simple Facebook post in 2016 rekindled our bond, leading to deep conversations about a cancer journey and work in cancer diagnostics. Join us as we recount how these serendipitous moments have woven our lives together once more.
In our final chapters, we dive into the emotional depths of family and survival. Planning a wedding to honor a father battling melanoma on 2/22/22, and cherishing memories of summers with a beloved grandmother, we explore the essence of family bonds. We also bring you an incredible story of hope: a loved one defying a grim cancer prognosis through determined, proactive medical intervention. Celebrate with us as we highlight the extraordinary strength and resilience that defines our shared journey. Tune in weekly and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook for more inspiring stories.
I will be your shield in the fiercest battle. I'll defend you from all these arrows and the sword. I will will keep you from danger.
Speaker 2:Let me be your shield this is crafting survival, a podcast that is not just about cancer. It's about the challenges in life. It's about surviving, overcoming, developing plans, speaking with survivors, people who have dealt with cancer, dealt with other challenges, experts in the field of medicine, science, innovation anyone who has dealt with life's challenges. This podcast for you. Sit back and enjoy Crafting Survival. So we're getting juicy today and hitting on our personal story.
Speaker 3:Talking about who we are, where we came from.
Speaker 2:Well, where we both came from.
Speaker 3:How our stories collided.
Speaker 2:Nice and warmed up with our rusted iron coffee for this topic.
Speaker 3:Stacey shout out to you. Thank you, sir. Going to have to stock the next couple podcasts for that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so where do we start 2014?
Speaker 3:That's when we recollided, but we didn't really until 2016.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we didn't really get into the details of that story. We said we'd get it, so let's start in 1988, 89.
Speaker 3:We're 11, 12 years old in the sixth grade.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Vista Heights Middle School.
Speaker 2:Marina Valley Wildcats.
Speaker 3:Yeah, in Marina Valley we became became classmates.
Speaker 3:Your family moved down from big bear into merino valley yeah my family was already there from 1981 when it was sunny mead, and uh yeah, I was four years old when we moved there. So I started all my schooling in merino valley. So you came in. I, you know, remember sixth grade. You would have been, have been the new person, the new group that came from Midland and so Vista Heights. There would have been five or six elementary schools that funneled in and so all the Midland kids I knew, a big population of sixth graders already going in. And then there were other schools that I had played sports against the boys can?
Speaker 2:I can just say that you know as a girl in middle school how much it sucks. Middle school sucks especially when you have no friends. All new people yeah hormones raging ugh. You and your best friend were the cool guys in school peter marisco yeah, I had a big crush on him um at the time.
Speaker 3:Not anymore, of course, but yeah, so that's really where our stories uh intertwine even more in eighth grade with peter, eighth grade, graduation, eighth grade, dance. Um, you know sixth and seventh grade we were just classmates. Classmates we didn't hang out. We knew similar people. You know again both athletes. You were swimming, I was a soccer baseball player, you know, and ruler of all sports on the PE field.
Speaker 2:You're so conceited. I still won the President's Award, so hey.
Speaker 3:Which is.
Speaker 2:Physical Fitness Award. You know how many push-ups I could do more push-ups than the dudes.
Speaker 3:Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2:Not now, but yeah, I bet you still could.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so Peter's eighth grade. You're going to go to the school dance with him.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:After the eighth grade graduation Uh-huh. And the week of that dance and the week of that dance, you showed up to school with all this pretty hair cut off, butch, butch style.
Speaker 2:Does that still a word? Short hair is like the in thing now. It's not butch anymore, is it?
Speaker 3:No, it wasn't that bad, demi Moore.
Speaker 2:Yes, I thought Demi Moore and Ghost was pretty. She was, and my sister convinced me that I would look good with her. Really, she hated me. She liked to torture me.
Speaker 3:Anyway.
Speaker 2:I was laughing Before we started. We were talking about spirituality and whatever, and my sister, who's no longer with us, bless her heart, rest in peace and she's the one who convinced me that I would be so cute with this short hair. My dad was like obsessed with short hair, so I ended up with this stupid short haircut before the eighth grade dance and it was like today's viral as viral it could be around the school that I look like a boy.
Speaker 3:Right, it was almost in the newspaper.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was bad. It was bad. Fortunately, I was an athlete and my saving grace was, I said forget all these people, I have skill Right. So we thought about, like crafting, survival and being confident and having skill and being an athlete, I think probably saved me a little bit in that situation because I at least had something to hang my hat on. So I was already at eighth grade. I was already an Olympic hopeful. So it's like whatever people so. I toughed through that situation.
Speaker 3:An excuse and an outlet.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But you came up to me and said hey, don't worry about it. One day I told Pete to go to dance with you because one day, when you get into high school, you're going to be hot. I was like, oh, I'm not now, but one day I will be. Okay, great, cool. Thanks for the pep talk man. But he did go to dance with me.
Speaker 3:And here we are married.
Speaker 2:You didn't go to dance with me.
Speaker 1:Pete went to the dance with me and here we are married.
Speaker 2:You didn't go to the dance with me, pete went to the dance with me. Yeah, lame dance. Eighth grade dance Right. Eighth grade drama.
Speaker 3:Right, where you may have had one dance with him.
Speaker 2:Probably not Right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's just at that age it's more of a social bragging to say that you have a date or you're going with somebody and the whole time you're there you might not even say hi, not even share a bag.
Speaker 2:Hang out with your girlfriends and the guys hang out in the corner.
Speaker 3:You don't even share a bag of popcorn.
Speaker 2:You always go to popcorn. Hey, I said hi to her.
Speaker 3:Hey guys, I said hi to her.
Speaker 2:So we go on to high school. Well, after that, that summer was a little rough for me, so it didn't really stop there. I wasn't as strong as I thought I was.
Speaker 3:What do you?
Speaker 2:mean what?
Speaker 3:happened.
Speaker 2:That summer. I I've never said it publicly yeah, I attempted suicide that summer. Pretty deep, yeah, fortunately.
Speaker 3:Thanks for sharing. That's brave.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I had to gather myself after seeing that one.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You were kind of the only person that knew, though Kind of came full circle, hence your business and your shirt today, right when we got together, that came up.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so in the six years since you and I have reconnected and formed a life together, I've known that you told me, shared with me, right, mm-hmm. And yeah, each time we get to the story where that can be inserted.
Speaker 2:We skip it.
Speaker 3:You Right.
Speaker 2:We. I'll let you tell the story.
Speaker 3:Right, it's not my place, right, I don't think to put that out there if you're willing to share that or not, but yeah, that's a big part of the story, I think.
Speaker 2:Which is kind of crazy because I was at the like top of my game as an athlete. Right eighth grade I made senior nationals which is right before making Olympic trial times it's a step below yeah, it's a step below, like the qualifying it's a time threshold, um, so it goes in swimming.
Speaker 2:People go oh, you went to the Junior Olympics. It's like no, junior Olympics is way low. It goes Junior National, senior National, olympic Trials. So I went to my first Junior Nationals and at my first Junior Nationals I made Senior Nationals, and then that following summer, I just missed the Olympic Trials as well by two hundredths of a second.
Speaker 3:That was after eighth grade.
Speaker 2:Yeah, which is crazy to think You're in this like deep, dark place and then so I can only hope. And when we got together it was like, well, what you did was probably give me that hope that I was okay at that age, which is kind of interesting because of our reconnection. So we go on to high school, Right.
Speaker 3:Before we get away from that, we've also talked about the pep talk, right when I grabbed you and said, hey, don't worry about what Peter thinks he's lame, You're going to be hot, all the guys are going want you, right, and that story when all the guys, when we rekindled, um, you know, you told me that story and how it had stuck with you, and even to the point where you told me that, uh, you shared that at job interviews or with colleagues.
Speaker 3:Other women, other women, a point in your life where you run into some challenging times. And how did you get through it? And you did, you fought through it.
Speaker 2:It was rough, though there were definitely rough times through that. My parents then got divorced when we were in high school and that was pretty ugly, really ugly, actually not pretty. It was very ugly and trying to be an athlete, manage school and friends and relationships which were pretty much non-existent because of how much I trained.
Speaker 3:You ran with the swim girls. Other girls had similar schedules. Those were your best friends.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we didn't really hang out though when we hit high school we didn't, but there is proof that we communicated, but we didn't hang out. We we figured that we sat across from each other in the same area at school oh, you and I yeah right, right, right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we saw each other passing right. I have this story in my head. One day football players were in the swimming pool and there goes Becky Thompson walking across the deck. And it was like you know, Winnie and. Fred, yeah, the Wonder Years right. He had the big crush and the music was playing. And there goes Becky and Stephanie, and it was your third buddy, sandra.
Speaker 2:So anyway, I divulge the good times high school, but we never really communicated don't remember communicating, and then I moved away after our sophomore year, yep, and we never spoke, never saw each other again for 22 years.
Speaker 3:Right, yeah, yeah, until 2016,. The Facebook post reconnected us 2014,.
Speaker 2:I connected with you.
Speaker 3:Right, yeah, but 2016,. Two years later, you responded Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2:Mm-hmm. So I think we touched upon it a little bit in the other podcast, but I don't think we really got into it because we said we would save it Right. So 2016,. You see my post.
Speaker 3:So in high school we wrote in each other's yearbooks on the same page. Yeah, what did it say? Oh my gosh, it's so lame.
Speaker 2:Mine's like you'll never go for me, Like you'll ever go for me, Never go for me. And yours is like hey, beautiful, If you ever need somebody, look me up.
Speaker 3:K-I-T.
Speaker 2:And you put bootyful, not even beautiful.
Speaker 3:So that tells me I had booty. Well, should you stand up and show the audience? No, well, should you stand up and show the audience? Yeah, so you take off from high school, go graduate from another high school no contact. The ironic part is we run very similar lives from there on out until we do reconnect. We went to school in another state on an athletic scholarship. I went to school in another state athletic scholarship. We both moved to another state and married somebody.
Speaker 2:We came back to California around the same time. Yep, we were only like 20 minutes apart.
Speaker 3:Lived. Yeah, when we moved back Another very crazy twist my brother and your sister both passed away around the same time of similar self-determined causes Alcohol abuse, drug abuse. Addiction Addiction, and both of our brother and sister have a son named Zach, who's also the same age, born in the same year. So that's a crazy part of the story. Then we get divorced around the same time.
Speaker 2:A couple years before me, Actually, in 2016, when you responded to my Facebook message that I sent you. I was going through divorce or I had already filed for divorce, but it was irrelevant. We didn't. I didn't share that with you at the time and it didn't matter Irrelevant to our conversation.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Our two day dialogue back and forth until I divulged. I was a cancer survivor and you're like, oh my God, I'm in cancer diagnostics and then okay, cool, if anything comes up, and I was like, well, nothing's coming up, I have no reason to talk to her anymore. Cancer's not coming back.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, other than your dad.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 2:You messaged me one more time about your dad, but at that point in time I worked for a company called Foundation Medicine, which was is you know, they still exist, but was the first um dna genomic sequencing company that was clinically sequencing patients, meaning that it was no longer in research. And so you had asked me do you know anything about b-ref and mech and these dna alterations that you had that caused your cancer? I was like, yep, I kind of know a lot about that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, right. So at that point I was a little over a year of NED, no evidence of disease, and I had told the cancer story a hundred times or so, a couple hundred times, and all those interactions never did anybody have any response to talking about alterations to my DNA or the specific ones at that, or even knowing what that is, and so it was kind of enlightening or comforting to know that somebody else does know what I was talking about Turns out to be you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the guy that was on your pathology report, your lab report, was actually a medical advisor that I knew, that I know very well, and he was one of the ones that helped bring that discovery and drug to market. So that was kind of crazy because it was like there was his name on your report. I was like, oh yeah, I see this guy I joke around and say the only reason you're with me is because you know I can maybe help save your life. But you're not going to get it again, right, anyway, yeah.
Speaker 2:It was 2016, but then we lose contact again, so we don't communicate for another two years, 2018.
Speaker 3:After I'm divorced.
Speaker 1:I'm on the dating scene.
Speaker 3:Yep, you are too. Yep, you're on the prowl. Saposexual.
Speaker 2:I said what the hell is this Made me look something up?
Speaker 3:So yeah, what does that mean?
Speaker 2:Mentally and physically available.
Speaker 3:Now that you're like attracted to. I don't remember the definition of saposexual.
Speaker 2:You better have to look it up.
Speaker 3:Yeah, go ahead and check it out. Yeah, I more remember your post. Is there any such thing as a mentally and physically available man? I was like what?
Speaker 2:What the hell is she talking about? Well, because they either like well, they only want to be physically available in the dating scene Bumble, good old Bumble, lots of fun stories with that but they don't want to put in any relationship work, even though they all boo and say, oh, I can't find a good person, and it's just kind of annoying, you know, but it was fun for a minute, but I was done having fun and like I actually didn't really even want to date. I think think by the time we got together I was like I'm over this, I don't want to even date, I'm gonna go. Oh yeah, I didn't go. Yeah, that's all.
Speaker 3:I was getting to that point too. I'd been through a couple girlfriends. I was like, yeah, what'd I tell you? I'm gonna need five or six different girlfriends, so each one can check a box.
Speaker 2:Yeah, which were what boxes?
Speaker 3:This is a family-friendly podcast, right? Yes, you know, adventure CrossFit working out taking care of yourself eating healthy, getting weird camping.
Speaker 1:Cooking.
Speaker 3:Walking on the beach? Yeah, cooking walking on the beach? Yeah, um, so I reached out and said, hey, what's going on?
Speaker 2:and, uh, you kind of did the same thing you're like wait, I thought he was with somebody. Well, you still had pictures of yourself with a girl right on there, a blonde, who I thought was your wife when it wasn't your wife. But so we got together and we met up for coffee.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 2:I think we were like chatting for like two weeks and met up for coffee, and that was kind of an interesting experience. We met at a coffee shop that's actually no longer there in Murrieta not this one no, not this one that we're drinking and, uh, you were standing in front of me.
Speaker 2:I remember having a cup of coffee, like the lady had handed me my cup of coffee and you were fortunately in front of me because I didn't even have butterflies, like nothing. I saw you walk across the parking lot, we met up, I pulled into my at that time I had the beautiful Jaguar and you had a work truck and I was standing behind you when I got the coffee and it just my hand just started shaking that the coffee was going to come out of the cup and I was like what the hell? And I set it back down and thinking that he can't see this, I'm not nervous, I don't even have butterflies. Why he's going to think I'm nervous and I'm not even nervous. What's going on? So that was pretty trippy.
Speaker 2:I had never experienced that before. The buzz yeah, it was something. It was energy, definitely strong energy.
Speaker 3:Right, our auras got close. I just started going. The vibration.
Speaker 2:But then I think we sat and talked for like two hours and you didn't even look at me, Like you stared out the window. It was like what the heck?
Speaker 3:Window licker. Yeah well, you remember what I said. You know my reason. Yeah, no, we have what I said.
Speaker 2:You know my reason yeah, no, we have an audience that doesn't know, like you said, but I had to go look it up as soon as I I had to go look it up, like you said, Wait what. You had to go look up saposexual and I had to look up what you came up with.
Speaker 3:Oh, what did I come up with?
Speaker 2:Capture myopathy. Ah, right, I was like what the heck is that Right? What is it when you look an animal in the eyes? It can no longer be returned to the wild.
Speaker 3:Chances are it's not going to be because it gets eaten. Yeah, that's exactly it Didn't want to lock eyes because I knew it would be over. I had the same buzz, you know, going off.
Speaker 2:My intuition was tingling yeah, so I think we were like friends for a couple months yep and then I got accepted into MBA school in Utah and I didn't tell you and I was going to go away, because my plan was I'm going to run this company, I'm going to go to nba school and see my son off to college, get him out of high school that's it not dating anymore. Hang out with my girlfriends, travel, study, study, build a business. And you interrupted the whole thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, what happened to MBA school? What happened to Utah?
Speaker 2:I deferred Because somebody's like oh, I want to have more than a friendship.
Speaker 3:I'll move to Utah.
Speaker 2:I'll travel to Utah with you. We're going to have a long-distance relationship. Heck, no, been there, done that too many times, no way. So I said well, I've worked hard my whole life, committed to doing hard things and maybe I can have fun instead and enjoy this. So I deferred and stayed with you, tried to build other businesses like know, non-profits and stuff that was uh.
Speaker 3:Time just flew right by that day in the coffee shop catching up, I think that was probably part of the tingle not seeing each other and actually, yeah, getting like actually talking?
Speaker 2:because I don't think we like. Obviously, as kids we never talked, we we really didn't hang out. Apparently, I think, according to our yearbooks, we like talking on the phone but neither one of us remember talking to each other on the phone. So it's a good thing. I don't think we would have. I think we would have destroyed each other as kids. And we would have had totally opposite reaction. We would have been mad at each other and cheated on each other, we would have competed.
Speaker 2:So, anyway, we got married right? Oh, that was actually part of it. Both of us also said, when neither one of us were going to get married again, right? So why did you think you weren't going to get married again? You said that because of your cancer diagnosis and dealing with that, that you didn't want to put somebody through that again.
Speaker 3:Right, yeah, that was a scare. That was definitely on the forefront of my mind 10 years ago.
Speaker 2:no, not that long ago yeah um for me, I was not getting married again because I don't want to pay alimony and child support.
Speaker 3:Again, again.
Speaker 2:Lose my ass again.
Speaker 3:There's no confidence in your next spouse, then huh.
Speaker 2:No, I wasn't confident in my own decisions. So we got married. So we decided to get married 222-222.
Speaker 3:He proposed to me on your birthday I did.
Speaker 2:Probably because I made you a good steak dinner.
Speaker 3:but you know, yes, made you a good steak dinner, but you know, yes, you made a great steak dinner. Yeah, the numerology, the numbers, the, yeah, the significance of my birthday at that point right, it was my birthday in 2014. I went into the ER, then my birthday in 2015. 2015 I was clean PET scan and then my birthdays. From there on out, my brother and I have made an effort to do some wild snow adventure get out and get lost in the snow on snowshoes or split boards or that's another lesson learned on my part too our little adventure out on the snow for our birthdays.
Speaker 2:We're only 12 days apart too, that's another kind of crazy interesting connection.
Speaker 3:My dad said you are the missing sister that he gave away to the gypsies yeah, the first time I met him.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's pretty funny, mm-hmm.
Speaker 3:And that was a joke that he told for probably the first time I met him. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty funny. And that was a joke that he told for probably as long as I can remember.
Speaker 2:Keep acting up, we're going to send you off with the gypsies, with your sweet twin sister. Yeah, it's kind of weird.
Speaker 1:We say things at like the exact same time.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the wedding so fast forward through those years?
Speaker 2:yeah, so we don't, we were gonna get engaged but I don't think we had any intention of actually getting married. We were both like, okay, we're engaged, we're committed, but we don't really have to get married, like we don't need to go through the process.
Speaker 3:But your dad encouraged it didn't know how and where and what, but uh, you sat down one day with my dad at my brother's house and went through the planning, we we forgot to finish off your birthday.
Speaker 2:It was your birthday, you proposed right and the ring that you gave me is your grandma friends yes yeah, why did you give me grandma friends ring? Why was that kept in the family? Because your mom had her jewelry.
Speaker 3:To me.
Speaker 2:I love it, by the way.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's a beautiful ring and my grandma's a beautiful grandma, beautiful lady, so we're going to get into some pretty crazy stuff now, right? The numbers the ring my grandma.
Speaker 2:No, let's save it for another one, okay, because that's a whole other topic in itself right, the numbers, the the ring my grandma. Okay, I mean, it's already obvious, we connected, the way we connected and everything.
Speaker 3:It's pretty intuitive and we're very connected right spiritually mm-hmm vibrationally energy right, um, yeah, my grandma's ring you are.
Speaker 2:Uh, yeah, my grandma speaks through you she's born january 17th, I'm january 18th and she passed away. Yeah, and I never got to meet her, which is unfortunate, right, she passed away 2018. It was right when we first started dating Right in the spring 2018. It was either that or fall 2017. Yeah, it was fall, because we went up to in November is when we went up, when our trip was planned and she had passed away maybe like a month and a half before.
Speaker 3:I thought it was 2018, fall yeah, yeah, 2018. She passed full yeah, yeah, 2018. She passed away. Yeah, you didn't get to meet her. We had a trip planned to ride the train, jump on the Amtrak in Oceanside and take it up to San Luis, which is right close to where my grandmother lived. It's where my mom's from where my mom and dad met there in Napomo, um, it's where my mom's from where my mom and dad met there in napomo, uh, it's just south of san louis, right there in the five cities, um, the royal grandee, pismo beach, grover beach, um, and we were gonna rent a car, or we did rent a car, but we were gonna drive down and stay with my grandma for a night and then head up to Morro Bay, and my grandma passed away just before our trip, so our plans changed. You never got to meet her, but we had a great trip, did all the things not all the things but took you to several of the places that she used to take me and my brother when we were kids.
Speaker 3:And we grew up in Southern California, and so we would spend a couple weeks with my grandma in the summers, Did golf lessons. She took us surfing, took us to the beach Pismo Beach.
Speaker 2:You have a cool family. That's what I love about your family.
Speaker 3:You have a cool family yeah, lots of fun. My grandma was a swimmer, yeah, and so the days that we weren't doing anything, we were going to Santa Maria and she would swim at the college there, john Hancock, and we'd spend the day jumping off the diving board and getting more out than the sun and the chlorine.
Speaker 2:So we decided to get married and we had no date, nothing planned, and then your dad became, his melanoma was coming in full force. I mean, he survived 17 years with melanoma, with tumors in his brain and his spine always dealing with that.
Speaker 3:Some type of radiation, yeah, gamma knife and all that.
Speaker 2:Never really had systemic therapy, but anyway. So he was getting worse and not doing well, because it really was spreading through his brain.
Speaker 3:Yeah, his spread to the brain a specific part or structure.
Speaker 2:The connective tissue, yeah, LMM, leptomeningeal.
Speaker 3:So the basket that holds your brain, that basically the blood brain barrier, is the mening, meningeal, meninges, meninges. Yeah, so it got into that woven basket and it was just so intricately tied in that and he had an optic nerve um tumor as well.
Speaker 2:So uh I love your dad, I love your dad very much. Um, so he's getting worse. And one day he was coherent he wasn't coherent actually, uh, he was just kind of out of it for the medication he was on and at your brother's house and uh, I sat down and held his hand and he perked up and he smiled at me and uh told me I think he told me I smelled good and uh, he um said let's plan this wedding. Just very clear, very crisp, very lucid, and says let's plan this wedding. And then you walked in the room and I said I guess we're planning this wedding. And you said, okay, let's do it. And he said, how, about 2, 22? And you're like I said that I told you that's when we should get married. I said, well, I guess that's it right. So we'll get married on 2, 22, 22 mm-.
Speaker 3:At a winery middle of the day. No one does a day wedding. Yeah, they said no breakfast, no one has breakfast.
Speaker 2:Breakfast Because he said we were going to all bring our Coleman stoves and that was the drugs talking our Coleman stoves and make hash browns and stuff.
Speaker 3:A pancake cookout.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like the fire department. Yeah, he's a fire fire fire chief, um, but he uh said that that's what we were gonna do, and so that's what we did. We got married on 2, 22, 22 minus the pancake cookout minus the pancake cookout. We had a catering, thankfully, but it was a lot of fun. Brunch wedding on a tuesday, which is people are like why do you get married on a tuesday?
Speaker 3:mike luna catering.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I don't remember the name of the business, but yeah, Mike.
Speaker 2:Something street tacos, even though it wasn't street tacos, you're right. Street wise, street wise.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's right. Good recall Whoop, mm-hmm, whoop.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so, so, anyway, yeah, yeah, so, anyway.
Speaker 2:That's it I mean that's our, our, the wedding, so my dad didn't make it oh yeah five days yeah five days prior 217. Yeah, yep rip maybe that's also like you know him making it that long, though, because he was given three to six months to live at his last kind of like you know doctor's appointment at that point in time, and that's, you know, part of the whole crafting survival, what we talk about at the nonprofit.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you stepped in. Yeah, you weren't cancer help desk then. No, you were Rebecca, help desk.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Operating on an individual basis.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so he was told he had three to six months to live on an inconclusive imaging radiology image and it wasn't good enough for me. You don't just decide to tell somebody they got three to six months to live without even knowing exactly what it is and exactly what all the options are. So we were able to get him a different kind of test that he wasn't even offered by his oncologist, unfortunately, don't know. We don't blame the oncologist, they just can't keep up with all the you know stuff all the time. So we had him tested and we at least confirmed he had melanoma and we were able to craft a plan for him. Of you know, we took him to an expert neuro-oncologist in Dr Casery, santosh Casery in Los Angeles, and he has seen plenty of those cancers and was able to give him their treatment 18 months right.
Speaker 2:He was 14 months he survived. But I mean three, six to 14 is a huge difference, especially with that disease and the fact that, you know, I truly think he was hanging on to be a part of our wedding and see his, you know, go on vacation. He was going to go on vacation with the granddaughters and do some things that he really wanted to do. So it's a big difference for people that you know, and, and I think for all of us, it's knowing that we did everything we could. Right, we had all the options. So, you know, that's kind of like our theme of crafting survival, I mean our story of survival. There's so much intertwined in all of that.
Speaker 3:Right. But anyway, yeah, here here we are bound together legally now remember, no matter the challenge, there are extraordinary people out there, overcoming the unimaginable.
Speaker 2:Their journeys remind us that grit and hope are powerful join us next time as we continue to explore the lives of those who face life's biggest challenges head on.
Speaker 3:Until then, stay strong, stay hopeful and keep crafting your own survival.
Speaker 2:Tune in weekly and follow us on Instagram TikTok and Facebook. This is Crafting Survival.
Speaker 1:We'll keep you from danger. Let me be your shield.