Note: There are some graphic descriptions of surgical procedures in this story.
Life has been anything but a bed of roses for Jared Chasteen and his family lately, from an unexpected cancer diagnosis to major surgery. But with support from faith, friends, and family they are facing adversity with courage and an attitude of thanks.
Jared has a business repairing computers and networks — he likened it to going “several places a day and try to put out fires.”
Jared’s wife Adeana worked for a medical supply company for years where Jared was the IT consultant. That company went out of business, so about 12 years ago they started the computer repair business together. Adeana did the marketing and all the books.
But in 2014 Adeana’s father had a heart attack and passed away suddenly. Jared was busy with his work and didn’t need Adeana’s help as much, so she responded to an invitation from Jayne Dawson to teach preschool at Aledo United Methodist Church.
A few years later the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
“We had a small business and we didn't have any money coming in,” Adeana said. “And we had kids about to go to college.”
The family had a discussion, and decided Adeana needed to get a job for a while. Although she never saw herself as a teacher, she went back to school and got her teaching certificate.
“I was the oldest student teacher and then that next year they hired me at Annetta when we first opened,” Adeana said.
The other members of the family are Andrew, a recent Aledo High School graduate who is a freshman at Ole Miss, and Noah, a 14-year-old who is a ninth-grader at Aledo High School.
The family moved to the Aledo area in about 2010, but it’s the last three months that have turned their world upside-down.
About June 20 Jared started experiencing pain, thinking it was in the area of his kidneys.
“I thought maybe I had a kidney stone or actually thought the couch was uncomfortable — you know, when you get older you feel pain sometimes,” Jared said.
Using a search engine to look at his symptoms, Jared thought he might have appendicitis. He went to the doctor, but they couldn’t figure out the problem. At one point they thought the pain might be prostate-related, but tests showed nothing was wrong.
The doctor sent Jared to get a scan of his belly, and after the scan the doctor called and told him that his appendix had ruptured, and that it looked strange on the scan. He was directed to go to an emergency room.
He and Adeana went that night to the ER at Harris Southwest.
“We spent like 28 hours in the ER until a surgeon came or until they could fit me in,” Jared said.
The surgery was supposed to take 45 minutes, and long after that point Adeana knew something had to be wrong as she waited for a report from the surgeon.
It was in the early morning hours on Saturday — they had been in the emergency room since Thursday — and Adeana was getting very worried.
“It was supposed to be a 45-minute appendectomy and he was so confident that that 45 minutes it'll be fine,” Adeana said.”And I'm the only one in the waiting room at Harris Southwest.”
About 4:30 a.m. the doctor told Adeana he thought Jared had cancer. He printed out pictures and showed her the lesions. He closed up the surgery without taking further actions, and recommended a surgeon.
As Jared came out from under anesthesia, he was not aware of the cancer prognosis. They sent Adeana back to recovery to be with Jared.
“There's not supposed to be anybody there,” Adeana said. “But he was freaking out and his heart rate was high.”
Jared recalled that some of his best friends had gone to the hospital with them.
“When I woke up, they all looked like their dog had been killed,” Jared said. “I was asking him ‘what's wrong — what are you not telling me?’ And they couldn't tell me anything because that's not their job.”
“I was as vague as I could be, but I said. ‘look, our boys are sitting at home. You've got to go home — we need to be with our children,’” Adeana said. “So I looked at Jared and I said, ‘We’re gonna get your heart rate down, you're gonna get your oxygen level down’” Adeana said. “The boys had been at home for a day and a half by themselves.
“And so we went home. We got home about 5:30 — the sun was just starting to come up and we lay down for about an hour and then we came in and we woke him up and told him the news.”
On Tuesday they received the lab results that it was stage four cancer, and that Jared needed to see a surgeon.
Waiting rooms can be dreadful places — often crowded while at the same time sterile and institutional. People in waiting rooms are stressed, worried, and on edge.
Even without Jared’s prolonged surgery, spending a couple of days in one would take a toll on anyone.
When asked what she felt when she received the news of Jared’s condition that early morning, Adeana was reflective.
“I was thinking, ‘No, no, we're not going to do this,’” Adeana said. “I thought, ‘I've got to hold it together. And I've got to be there for everybody.’
“So I just thought, ‘Okay, we're gonna do this, we're gonna get this figured out.’ I mean, he was very adamant. ‘I think it's cancer.’ And he told me that, but I couldn't tell Jared and I couldn't tell the boys and so I just felt a lot of ‘You're gonna have to pull this together and just get through this because it's just the way life is.’”
Surgical plan
The type of cancer Jared has is signet ring adeno cell carcinoma, an epithelial cancer that grows on the surface of organs, rather than inside the organ.
The surgeon they visited had a plan.
“His plan was to open me up and cut out all of my organs that I didn't need,” Jared said. “He was very confident. I mean, he's a good surgeon, I believe.”
“He was very confident, like, 'Oh, I see this all the time. We can do this’ and it was a little scary at first because we were like, ‘What are you talking about? They just said the signet ring adeno cell carcinoma is this rare thing but you're saying you see it all the time?’” Adeana said.
Adeana and Jared decided they wanted a second opinion, and reached out to MD Anderson Cancer Center, which opened up another series of frustrations.
“We were able to get what we thought was an appointment with MD Anderson,” Jared said. “And MD Anderson screwed my appointment up four times.”
“Three times we had administrative issues,” Adeana said. “Like they first scheduled it with a surgical oncologist and then they called, ‘Oh, whoops, sorry, we need an oncologist.’”
“So the next appointment is two weeks away and then another two weeks away,” Jared said.
“So it was July 25. And it was August 3, then it was August 21,” Adeana added.
“I was really pinning a lot of hopes. I'd heard how good they are and how many people they helped,” Jared said. “Their reputation is stellar, right? And my experience wasn't stellar with them.”
In the midst of this experience the family had a trip planned. Andrew had just graduated.
“We asked the doctor, ‘Can we go on our trip?’” Adeana said. “And he said ‘Yes, you should. Go enjoy yourself. We want you to spend time with your family. Do all the things you want to do.’”
“He said that it's been probably growing in you for four or five years. And going on the trip wouldn't in essence hurt anything. And then while we were on the trip, of course, MD Anderson canceled again.”
The family returned on Aug. 5, although Jared was very uncomfortable on the flight back. One of Adeana’s students had seen on social media what was happening, and that student’s aunt reached out to see if she could help them get into MD Anderson.
She recommended the family drive down to Houston, and she would meet them at MD Anderson acute care.
So on Sunday, Aug. 6, Adeana and Jared went to Houston.
“We didn't have anything other than that one surgeon and he wanted to do something soon, and we wanted a second opinion, and we were feeling so lost and we didn't have any pain medicine or any nausea medicine or any any medicine,” Adeana said.
They met the aunt at MD Anderson’s emergency room, where it was discovered that Jared had blood clots on his lungs.
“They said that the cancer was not in the lungs but the cancer was still in the other spots, and there's really nothing they can do,” Adeana said. So they were instructed to go home and return for their appointment Sept. 1.
Jared and Adeana arrived home about 2:30 a.m., and Adeana had to start school the next morning at 8 a.m.
“And I tried, from Aug. 8, until Aug. 19, to like, ‘hey, I can maybe push through for a month.’” Jared said.
But he started getting sick. For a couple of weeks he couldn’t eat or drink, and his stomach was becoming distended. He was throwing up, so they found a local oncologist.
“He was vomiting nonstop,” Adeana said. “And so I took him to that oncologist appointment, and he just looked at me and said ‘You can't wait anymore.’”
The oncologist gave Jared infusions and an IV to help hydrate him. He called the surgeon the next morning. This was on a Thursday, and they scheduled a colonoscopy on the upcoming Monday.
That was the weekend they were supposed to take Andrew to college. Jared had to stay home, but her brother-in-law and Noah went to help get Andrew moved in. Adeana’s mother and Jared’s father stayed behind to help Jared.
While Adeana was moving Andrew into his dorm at Ole Miss, Jared’s scheduled colonoscopy and endoscopy did not go well. The colonoscopy could not be completed because the cancer had completely obstructed his bowels. Jared received a CT scan instead.
Adeana came home Monday night and went to school on Tuesday to prepare for the first day of school on Wednesday. Surgery was scheduled the following Wednesday, Aug. 23.
“I was trying to just get through,” Jared said. “I was only drinking protein shakes at the time because I couldn't eat.”
Adeana called the surgeon on Sunday, Aug. 21, because Jared had thrown up all day Saturday. The surgeon told them to go to the emergency room.
It was a Sunday morning, and Jared told Adeana he wanted to stop at the church on the way to the emergency room to see if they would pray with him.
Aledo United Methodist Church was in the midst of its Sunday morning service when Adeana and Jared arrived.
“We walked in, and Pastor Joel stopped the service,” Adeana said. “And everybody came around us and prayed over us and then walked us to our car.”
They went to Medical City in Fort worth, where they determined he was impacted and attempted to clear out his stomach before they admitted him into the hospital.
“And then things just got crazy,” Adeana said. He started getting more blood clots and started having troubles with heart rate. His heart rate was like 174 and blood pressure was very low.
With three days to scheduled surgery, it was unclear whether Jared would be able to have surgery.
In each of the three nights before the surgery, Jared was on a different floor of the hospital because they had to manage different problems.
“The last night he was on the cardiac floor because everything was so out of whack,” Adeana said. “They had to get his heart rate from 174 down so that they could be able to do it, and we didn't know until nine o'clock that morning when they came in they said, ‘Yeah, surgery’s a go.’”
“But even then it was kind of nerve wracking because the surgeon said that I was so distended that he may have to leave me open for four days because he didn't think he could close my skin up,” Jared said. “I didn't want to sit underneath medicine for four days and have an open gut, but the NG tube was not able to remove enough of the gastric juices and stuff to get it less distended.”
The surgery performed on Jared is called ‘debulking.”
“They take out everything that you can live without, and try to leave as much as you can live to help you have a good life,” Adeana said. “And then they cauterized all the little cancerous lesions because his cancer is on the exterior of the organs.
“They took out the appendix, they took out the gallbladder, they took out part of the small bowels and one part of the colon that they had to take out because of the impaction.”
Adeana described part of the surgery they saw videos of afterward.
“They would squeeze and milk the intestines — they would bring it out and they would just pull out more or more. They squeezed off three liters, 20 pounds of fluid. And they got it all out. And then they put everything through this machine and scanned it to see if it had any cancer in it. And if it did, he would find the lesion and burn it off. They sucked out all the bad stuff, then they put in heated up chemo.”
In that process the surgical team gave him a chemo bath (Hyperthermic Intraperitoneal Chemotherapy). In that process, the chemicals are heated and pumped into the abdomen. The incision is temporarily closed and the chemicals are agitated throughout the abdomen for 60-90 minutes.
During the chemo bath, the surgeon told Adeana that he got 98 percent of the cancer, and was able to save enough of the small intestine to avoid short bowel syndrome, which develops when the small intestine is shortened or damaged and cannot absorb enough nutrients from the foods you eat to maintain health.
An additional piece of good news was that they were able to close the incision.
Between the pre-op, the surgery, and the post-surgery, Jared was in the hospital 18 days with Adeana by his side.
“She's spent about 18 days sleeping in a recliner — yeah, she's the most amazing woman in the world,” Jared said.
During that time, extended family members stayed with Noah at home and took fresh clothes to Adeana at the hospital.
Jared felt the nurses in the ICU at Medical City in Fort Worth saved his life.
“I truly believe that I probably wouldn't be sitting here if it weren't for a few of these nurses,” Jared said.
Jared and Adeana shared that the nurses continually checked on him, often even after their shifts were over.
“We had nurses that literally followed us throughout the hospital and all our rooms on their times off.,” Adeana said. “They stay above and beyond.”
Adeana added that some of the nurses came in for extra shifts because the hospital was understaffed.
“And they were like, ‘I'm just going to come in and check the chart’ and the next thing you know, they're changing out our IVs. And I would say, ‘Wait, you're off the clock’ and the nurse would say ‘Well, but the job's not done. I can't leave.’”
“They're very undervalued in the world. And they do a lot,” Jared said.
Adeana recalled that Jared’s blood pressure was was very low and his heart rate was 160 the night out of surgery. Their nurse was named Hemra.
“Hemra didn't leave our side,” Adeana said. “He had two people and he would run out, check on them real fast, and come back. And the next night when he was on, he just told me ‘no girl you got this, you sleep. I got this,’ and so he did. He took care of him so that I could get like three hours of sleep that night.”
The first night out of surgery had other complications. Jared was supposed to be sedated with a ventilator in his mouth.
“I wasn't asleep — I was awake the whole time,” Jared said.
He attempted to communicate with Adeana by scribbling in a notebook she handed him.
One of the things Jared wanted was to know when the breathing tube was going to come out.
He and Adeana knew, because Jared’s stepfather had recently had a heart attack and had been on a breathing tube, that the volume on the breathing tube had to be turned down gradually.
“I feel like a lot of that kind of prepared us for that, that beginning of that fight,” Adeana said.
“It's like breathing through a straw,” Jared said. “You don't feel like you're getting enough and so you try to fight it, so I would try to calm myself down.”
Back at home
After the surgery Adeana returned to work. Her mom stayed at the house in the mornings and Jared’s family came in the afternoons. Adeana is close enough at work that she can get home quickly if needed.
Jared’s appetite slowly returned.
“I actually do eat peaches for breakfast — they had cups of Dole peaches in the hospital. That was one of the first things I could eat. I guess it just took me back to being a kid,” Jared said. “I've lost a lot of weight and really trying to get stronger for this next phase of chemotherapy and stuff.”
The Chasteens learned that the origin of the cancer was not the colon — it was the appendix, and probably started five years ago.
“There's only like 200,000 people in this world that have it,” Adeana said. “It's very rare — they don't know what caused it.”
It’s the type of cancer that usually can’t be found unless the medical personnel are looking for it.
“There's really no tests to find it until it gets to an advanced stage,” Adeana said.
A couple of weeks later, Jared had a port installed so chemotherapy could begin.
The first round has six treatments, once a week, and then Jared will be sent home with a pump for administration of chemotherapy at home.
“A doctor said at the beginning that the outside of organs are very hard to get. But it's better to be on the outside than the inside in essence, but it's still it's very hard to get medicine to hit the outside,” Jared said. “Hopefully after that chemotherapy I'll rest and then he said we may need another dose. He also says I'll probably have to have surgery again, so that doesn't make me too excited after the last experience, but you know, whatever I have to do to try to maximize a good life here on this planet, whether it's six months or six years, I mean, it is what it is, we will make the best of it.”
In addition to the physical and emotional trauma of a condition like Jared’s, there are devastating financial costs as well — both in terms of medical bills and in terms of lost income due to inability to work.
“I spent my whole life trying to earn enough money to put my kids in college and take care of my wife and everything — it sucks not being able to do that. It really does,” Jared said. “My whole life was trying to have enough money to help my family and to help others and have enough for my kids to go to college. And you know, it's a good purpose.”
“We've talked about just how this sucks, it really sucks,” Adeana said. ‘But cancer has given us this opportunity to appreciate each other, and to say the things that we wouldn't have.”
It's kind of weird, but it's probably one of the best gifts I was ever given,” Jared said. “I was a skeptical person — not so trusting of everybody. Just, I guess, because of my life, and trying to make things on my own. And cancer has given me the gift to see how many beautiful, wonderful people in the world there are. You know, for every one bad person, there's 50 or 100 that are great. The reaction and the outpouring of total strangers, it changes you. It gave me a gift that I could never have had otherwise.”
“It's overwhelming,” Adeana said. “We're the kind of people that want to be doing stuff. I'd much rather take food to somebody else or support something. But I don't like being the center of attention. It's hard to receive.”
“The community in essence is a family here,” Jared said.
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