IT AIN'T WHAT YOU KNOW...

Part One: Hard lessons from my wife’s fight with cancer.

“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble.
It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.”

— Mark Twain

No words proved more prophetic than those in the year our world began to fall apart.

I’ve been hesitant to write about my wife’s cancer. Her pain. My grief. All that we lost. Mostly because I don’t want to live through it again.

But I also don’t want this Substack to become just me lamenting over her death. I want these words to offer something useful for anyone who reads them. And yet, there were no harder lessons than the ones I learned in those seven months of her diagnosis. Nothing has changed me more, or probably ever will.

So this is her cancer story.
All the fear, all the courage, and all the heartache in between.

It was Christmas of 2023 when my wife, Judy, first said she was feeling off.

We were visiting my family in Eugene, Oregon like we did every winter break. She mentioned having trouble going to the bathroom and feeling a little bloated.

Now, my wife had OCD. Not the extreme kind where you have to check the locks ten times, but she had her rituals. Certain things had to be done at certain times, or it would frustrate her. She had to mop the floors every night before bed. The dishes had to be done right after meals, no stacking was ever allowed. Shoes off in the house. Always.

And maybe the biggest one of all—her bathroom time. She needed space and time for her routine. And for whatever reason, my wife was obsessed with it. I received almost daily reports if she had a good or bad… uh… bathroom experience.

So when she told me that Christmas, she was constipated, I didn’t think much of it. She usually was when we traveled, her routine got thrown off. But as the vacation wore on and we got ready to head home to Los Angeles, she mentioned feeling fatigued, too. I just shrugged and said, “It’s all the traveling. Once we get back, it’ll be fine.”

But it wasn’t.

Back home, she was still struggling with fatigue and constipation. And then, a sharp pain began shooting down her right hip.

I wish I could say I was alarmed. But that’s not the truth. I chalked it up to a pulled muscle from her working out too hard and not getting enough sleep.

As her fatigue and pain grew worse, she started getting more worried. It became all she talked about. By the end of January, she even mentioned, “What if it’s cancer?”

“It can’t be,” I said. “We just got checked up.”

Just six months earlier, we’d gone to Taiwan to visit her family for the summer. While there, we both did full medical checkups.

Unlike in America, where taking your blood pressure and saying “ahhh” qualifies as a physical, in Taiwan, it’s a full day of diagnostics. MRI, colonoscopy, a complete blood panel, all in a spa-like clinic. The works. For around fifteen hundred bucks.

And except for a slight uptick in cholesterol, Judy was in perfect health.

Maybe if we hadn’t done that checkup, I would have listened better. Been more concerned. Taken action.

I want to believe that, but honestly? I don’t know.

I had a way of brushing aside her pain. Like so many women whose symptoms are ignored, misdiagnosed, or dismissed as being “overly dramatic.”

I did precisely that.

And I beat myself up for it. I should have listened more. I should have taken her seriously. Because maybe—just maybe—she’d still be alive.

And that’s a guilt I’ll carry for the rest of my life.

By February, I finally started paying some attention and joined her in searching for answers.

Her primary doctor gave her laxatives and told her it’s just stress.

She couldn’t get in to see a gastroenterologist until April, so she went to a few herbal doctors and an acupuncturist. One told her she had an ovarian cyst and said he could break it up by massaging her stomach. But when we tried, it only made the bloating and pain worse.

One day, the pain got so bad that she went to urgent care. After an exam, the doctor said the problem was likely hemorrhoids from the constipation, and she needed a surgical consult. Soonest they could see her? May.

She decided to try an OB/GYN and found one that wasn't booked three months out. After reviewing the full medical health report from Taiwan, the doctor reassured her:

“There’s no way cancer would show up this fast. Must be something else.”

Those were her exact words.

It would be several more weeks before Judy could get in for an ultrasound. And by then, she was starting to limp from the pain in her hip. I finally snapped out of my malaise. I did a little WebMD sleuthing. Convinced myself—and her—it must be sciatica.

But the earliest we could see a neurologist or orthopedic surgeon was summer.

I love America, but our healthcare system is a sad joke.

We knew she'd get faster and better care in Taiwan. So, in early March, she boarded a 14-hour flight back.

In Taiwan, she spent weeks chasing the idea that sciatica was the cause. But the pain became unbearable. She was popping aspirin like candy.

After ruling out an autoimmune disease (I can’t remember which one), the neurologist ordered a CAT scan of her hips.

The scan was inconclusive. Nothing wrong with her nerves, but at the top of the image, something looked off. Her intestines were poking into the scan as if being pushed down from above.

That afternoon, she saw an OB/GYN who performed an ultrasound on the spot.

That’s when they saw it.

The source of all her pain.

The beginning of our end.

A tumor.

---

---

There’s no easy way for me to tell my wife’s story. It’s all or nothing. So, instead of giving you one big novel, I'm breaking it into several Substack posts.

Bear with me as I write it all out. And if I can leave you with one piece of advice:

LISTEN

To your body. To your loved ones.
Don’t dismiss it. Or THEM.
Don’t blow it off as stress. Or being dramatic.

Please, be wiser than I was.
And instead, hold on to this other piece of advice from Mark Twain: