One year ago, an Indiana mom received a call from her husband at the emergency room. She had no idea their lives would change forever. Bohacik, 39, had been watering the flowers when the call came.
"I think you need to come up here," her husband, 43-year-old Rob, said from the other end of the phone. Over the fourth of July weekend in 2025, Rob started complaining about what seemed like a stomachache. He and Brittany guessed he might have eaten something bad, had a virus or just been run down.
"There was nothing about it that made either of us think our lives were about to change," Brittany told Newsweek. Still, Rob continued with work, being a husband and also a father to their daughter Ava, who was eight at the time. But eventually, when his symptoms became impossible to ignore, he drove himself to the hospital.
"That detail stays with me because of how ordinary it was," Brittany said. There wasn’t some dramatic moment where we knew something catastrophic was happening. Eighteen days after those first stomach symptoms began, our entire life had changed." On July 22, 2025, Rob was diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic adenocarcinoma, and the cancer had already spread to his liver.
The couple were left reeling. Days ago, they were going about their normal lives—working, parenting, talking about what they had planned for the weekend. The next minute, they were discussing chemotherapy, metastasis and survival statistics.
"People imagine there must have been some enormous warning sign that we ignored," Brittany said. Our lives didn’t slowly become a cancer story. It felt like we walked into one overnight." For the next eight months, Brittany made it her mission to try to save her husband.
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