I was driving to work when my dad called. My phone was dying, barely hanging on above one

percent, so I didn’t answer at first. I was trying to keep it alive. When he called again, I picked up.

It sounded like the wind had been knocked out of him.

“I just talked to the doctor,” he said. “It’s really bad.”

“What?” I asked. “What?”

“Pancreatic cancer.”

I remember exactly where I was driving when he said it. The world just stopped. There was an

immediate denial—this couldn’t possibly be how someone is told something like this. A Friday

afternoon phone call. No diagnosis confirmed. He hadn’t even been able to reach my mom yet

because she was still at work.

It felt surreal. It felt wrong. It felt wildly inappropriate to tell my dad something like that over the phone,

on a Friday, without sitting with him, without certainty. What made it worse was learning that the results had been there for three weeks. Three weeks

where no one had read them. Three weeks where time passed quietly, unnoticed.That weekend was the worst of my life.

What I struggled with most was the unfairness of it. My dad is a good person. He has always been

active—his entire life. He worked a physically demanding job delivering Pepsi, carrying heavy cases

up stairs all day, every day. He was one of the fastest in the country at it. He ate well. There was

always a vegetable on his plate. He had one beer in his entire life. He never smoked, never did drugs,

rarely even took Tylenol.

We’re always told not to do certain things, as if cancer is something you earn by making bad choices.

My dad didn’t do any of those things. And he still got one of the worst cancers there is. That didn’t feel

fair.

That weekend, waiting for his appointment, was filled with fear and emotion. My dad and I cried

together. He had been so sick, and I truly didn’t know if he was going to die that night—or the next

day. I had never felt that kind of uncertainty before.

At one point he said, “I’m not giving up. I’m going to fight.”

I asked him, “Are you?” Because I hadn’t even conceptualized that fighting was an option yet.

“Of course,” he said. “I’ll do whatever I can. I owe that to my family.”

I thought about something my field hockey coach used to say before games: Leave it all on the field.

Whether you win or lose, if you leave it all on the field, you can live with the outcome.That weekend, my dad and I promised each other we would do exactly that. We would leave it all on the field. We would do everything we possibly could. And I knew that if it didn’t work out, that would be the last thing I ever did for my dad—and I could live with that.

On Monday, my dad sat down with his primary care provider alongside my mom. They laid out what

they thought it was. Over the weekend, I had done some research and pushed my dad to ask for a

CA 19-9 blood test. I wanted clarity—was this really pancreatic cancer, or something else? My dad

asked for the test.

After explaining their thoughts, my dad looked at his doctor and asked, “Doc, do you think I have a chance?” The doctor said, “Joe, I really don’t know.”

I still struggle with that moment. Why not say, “This is beyond my realm. I don’t know. The odds aren’t great—but there’s always a chance. Why wouldn’t it be you?”

This is where I believe doctors in Maine need to be clearer. Patients deserve to know there are options beyond local care. There are places that do more than standard, run-of-the-mill treatment.

Clinical trials take five to seven years to become FDA-approved. If a hospital doesn’t offer trials, they

are years behind the cutting edge of medicine. That difference matters.

When my dad’s CA 19-9 results came back, they were through the roof. The urgency we felt was now

confirmed. We still hadn’t heard back from the local cancer center. We were told they couldn’t get him in for a

biopsy or a PET scan until February 5th. The call telling him about cancer came on January 3rd. That

was more than a month of waiting.

I asked them, “Doesn’t time matter with these things? Isn’t that what you always say?”

They said, “It doesn’t matter that much.”

I wished they had said instead, “This is the soonest we can get you in—but you are welcome to seek

care elsewhere. Larger hospitals, places like Boston, may be able to see you sooner.”

So I picked up the phone. I made calls.

Three days later, my dad had a biopsy scheduled at a different hospital in southern Maine. We got the biopsy done there first. That one was done down the throat. Shortly after, we had asecond biopsy done the more traditional way. Both confirmed the same thing: stage four adenocarcinoma that had already spread to the peritoneum. There was no longer any uncertainty. By then, I had already called Dana-Farber. The appointment they gave us was two weeks out. Two weeks felt both urgent and impossibly far away. My goal in that time was to gather everything—every scan, every report, every lab, every biopsy—sothat when we arrived, we weren’t starting from scratch.During that time, I started thinking about this the way I understood anything hard: like sizing up an

opponent. If you’re going to play someone in football, you don’t just show up and hope for the best. You watch their tapes. You learn their tendencies. You figure out what you’re actually up against before you decide how to fight That’s how I approached my dad’s cancer.I wanted to know exactly what it was. How it behaved. Where it spread. What treatments worked.What didn’t. The difference between standard care and experimental care.The goal wasn’t information for information’s sake. The goal was strategy.

If we were going to fight this, we needed to know our opponent.In Maine, delay is not an exception. It is the baseline.Primary care doctors may not be accepting new patients at all. OB-GYNs and specialists routinelyhave waits of three to six months. Imaging can be done quickly, but readings can take weeks. Referrals disappear into queues that no one seems to be actively watching. None of this is framed as dangerous. It’s framed as normal.

The problem is that illness does not care what’s normal for a system.