Chad Wants You Happy
Episode # 50
Heidi’s husband Chad used to tell her, in the third person, “Chad just wants you to be happy.” He said it when they were dating. He said it when they were married and healthy. He said it after he was diagnosed with a bone marrow disease that came back from the biopsy lab with the words “poor prognosis” stamped on the report.
Frankly, I cannot imagine facing that news with two young children and a lifetime of dreams ahead of you, and still finding a way to make your spouse’s happiness the rule you live by after he is gone. Heidi did.
A week after donating half her liver to Chad, she was sitting in the basement of a hospital in Seoul on Christmas, eating Domino’s pizza with her sister-in-law, while Chad was upstairs on a respirator learning how to breathe again.
Redefining the “Fight”
We talk about cancer like it is a fight. We talk about winning and losing. Heidi and Chad lost. He died at 46 of acute myeloid leukemia after years of treatment, a liver transplant in Korea that worked, and a bone marrow transplant on the East Coast that didn’t. By any rule the world hands you, Heidi lost.
Heidi does not call it losing.
There is a script we keep getting handed where the only good story is the survival story. After forty years inside cancer caregiving, in my own family and outside of it, I do not believe the script anymore. It is wrong, or at least incomplete, in a way that is costing people their healing.
Inside the Episode
Heidi has a way of putting it that I have not been able to shake. We get into:
Running the diagnosis like a startup: How she and Chad approached his treatment strategically.
The day in Gangnam: How she ended up alone on a day she should have been at the ICU, and why she calls it the day she put her oxygen mask on.
The North Star: How a mantra Chad gave her in his own third person became her guiding light.
Deep Dive for Paid Subscribers
The full piece for paid subscribers goes into the research catching up to what Heidi already knows, the rare disease the world is finally learning to name, and the clinical trials Chad’s death helped make possible. If you have ever loved someone through a fight you didn’t win, this one is for you.
Watch here on YouTube:
Read the full piece: [paid Substack link]
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