The Best and Worst Year of Our Lives

2024....It's been a year to say the least.

One year ago, I never could've imagined how quickly life would change. It seemed that all of our plans were starting to come together...

We closed out 2023 celebrating the launch of my company Next Adventure Financial and started 2024 with achieving a major goal in our financial plan - we purchased our RV and had plans of spending a month out west working & exploring Montana and Wyoming.

This is something we'd put off for a while but recognized that we couldn't keep kicking this goal down the road.

When spring rolled around we received the best news of our lives...

We found out we were expecting our first child!

Both of us were beyond excited and thrilled for this next step in our lives.

But we never could've imagined what would follow the best news of our lives.

In May, my wife completed a routine prenatal test which screens for certain chromosomal abnormalities in the baby and can tell you the sex of the baby much earlier than an ultrasound.

The prenatal test came back with "Uninformative DNA Pattern" which apparently is very rare; our doctor had never seen this before and didn't know how to interpret the results (these tests are typically either positive or negative).

We were referred to a genetic counselor who said it could be any number of things but was likely a testing error so we were advised to take another test.

The second test gave the same result - Uninformative DNA Pattern - but the lab was able to tell us whatever the issue was, it was maternal and not fetal.

Our genetic counselor mentioned that there was a study being done at the National Institutes of Health where they were researching these results and they're finding that they're associated with certain malignancies so we were advised to participate.

We completely brushed all this off.

My wife felt great and actually had been having a pretty uneventful pregnancy.

The genetic counselor again urged us to participate in the study and mentioned a few other patients had gone and were diagnosed with cancer.

After hearing this we decided to go out to the study (now July).

While at the study, they found nodules in my wife's lung, liver, and abdomen and suggested that the likely diagnosis was either lymphoma or leukemia.

We proceeded to have a biopsy done which showed no cancer.

That was followed by a lung biopsy of the lung nodules as they began to suspect an advanced lung cancer. That biopsy also came back negative for cancer.

We started to hear that this could likely be an infection or an autoimmune disease but they still couldn't rule out cancer.

We ultimately decided to do one last biopsy (now October) to remove a whole lymph node which finally gave us answers.

Stage 4 Hodgkin Lymphoma.

Absolutely no signs or symptoms.

Literally weeks before the birth of our daughter.

We welcomed our daughter, Palmer Rae Lachner, in November and both her & mom are doing very well!

Palmer is the reason we found out about this and helped save my wife's life.

All of this is still unreal.

Thankfully, my wife still feels great and is making her way through treatment. Oddly enough, she still hasn't experienced any symptoms to this day.