Doctors informed them that at 29 years old, Nate had stage 4 squamous-cell carcinoma — extremely rare for a young and healthy non-smoker. Kacee remembers holding her breath as Nate and the doctor discussed his options, and what this meant.
As they walked out, Nate joked, “You sure picked a good one,” and Kacee could feel the sobs building up inside her. She fled to the waiting area, and let the tears come, hard.
Following the diagnosis, there were a flurry of doctor’s visits. Nate was referred to the Huntsman Cancer Institute, a world-renowned hospital in Salt Lake City.
“Every time we went to an appointment, we’d learn a little bit more,” Kacee says, “and every time we learned more, it got worse and worse.”
A Type-A notetaker, Nate surprised himself by not researching his condition and becoming an expert on it. To this day, he feels somewhat undereducated on the science of his cancer. Likewise, Kacee didn’t want to know the gritty details.
“I knew our odds were bad enough,” Kacee says. “I didn’t need to fill my head with all these examples of how bad it actually was.”
One thing Nate did look into was whether there were other people who had gone through the same thing. What were their experiences? Was it normal that they didn’t want to know what they were truly up against?
By coincidence, they discovered that a friend’s brother received the same diagnosis and was treated by Nate’s surgeon at the same hospital. They befriended him, but tragically, he only lived two years post-surgery.
The details of Nate’s case were so unusual that a crew of doctors regularly met as a group to discuss it. One doctor presented Nate’s case during a medical conference to some of the best surgeons in the country, and even they had no idea what was going to happen on the operating table.
