Ben Sasse

But our providential surprise, our boy's a decade younger.

And I was immediately thinking about

Melissa, my best friend of 33 years, and Augustine is our son, but that's theologically heavy for 14.

It's hard to shout at a baseball or a football game.

So we call him Breck.

So I was thinking about Breck, and I said, how do I navigate this moment?

I want the 101, you know, give me oncology navigation.

They said three broad categories.

There's radiation, there's surgery, and there's chemo.

There's chemo writ small and chemo writ large.

Chemo writ large is carpet bombing your body's ability to produce cells.

Chemo writ small is what does it look like to try to do a targeted therapy and get on a clinical trial?

You have a definite death sentence, but there are some clinical trials that could extend life a little bit.

And I said, teach me how that works.

And they said, you want to figure out

where there's a genetic mutation potentially.

And so we did a bunch of procedures.

We ended up with nine successful biopsies in the next couple of days.

We sent them off to labs all over the country and we found two genetic mutations.

And it turns out the two best places to do clinical trials around pancreatic are Memorial Sloan Kettering in the Upper East Side or MD Anderson in Houston.