- I continued to do research, and I continued to listen to my body.

There is a level of critical thinking and analysis that goes into any diagnosis that I felt like was just not being applied.

So, if others weren't going to apply it, then I needed to do it for myself because there's no better advocate for you than you.

(calm bright music) The medical community, Navy Medicine has determined that it is more likely than not that my cancer is caused from toxic exposure, just byproduct of what we do.

I've got five years and four months of service overseas and combat deployments and various humanitarian response.

I took an oath and in that oath, I was also willing to and very cognizant of the fact that I could give my life to my country at some point.

I didn't know that that would happen in slow motion, but I don't have any regrets, and I still mean every bit of my commitment.

Here I am fighting the new fight.

(calm bright music continues) My name is Ashley Chrisman.

I am an active duty Marine officer.

Been serving for about 16 and a half years now.

I have a small bowel net, primary in the small intestine and terminal ileum, stage four.

So, it's already metastasized to multiple locations before we had diagnosed it and found it in grade two.

So, a little bit slower, but kind of medium as to how these things go.

(calm piano music) Serving in the military, it was just something I thought about for years and you know, went to college, wanted to finish my degree.

I was wrapping that up and then 9/11 happened.

And just watching what our nation went through is something that I still get a little emotional about.

And I just wanted to be part of the solution.

I wanted to help.

(calm piano music continues) The Marine Corps means an opportunity to be a part of something much bigger than I am, an opportunity to contribute to our national security and defense, an opportunity to protect those that I love, family and community, and our values, our American values.

Just part of who I am now.

I think if I were not in the Marine Corps, and I were not a Marine officer, I would not have lived this long.

In the Marine Corps, we have a saying which is "Semper Fidelis," which means "Always faithful."

We also have a saying that's less formal, which is "Semper Gumby," which means "Always flexible" (chuckles) and certainly not Latin.

It uniquely applies, I think, to my situation because you have a plan in life.

Every day, my wife and I are waking up, we're putting on the uniform, we're going to work, we're raising our son, we're ready at a moment's notice to deploy in defense of our own nation and national security.

We were not prepared for waking up and putting on our cancer fight, but we flexed, and we're doing it, and we're making it happen the best way that we know how.

- My name is Melissa DePriest.

I'm Ashley's wife.

And we're both active duty Marine Corps officers serving on Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton.

(calm piano music continues) - Melissa and I met serving together, which was great and unexpected.

We actually met in Quantico.

We were both serving at an officer candidate school.

We were just fast friends initially.

Now, we've been married for 10 years and have a three and a half year old son, which is just hard to believe.

- So, if I had to tell you about Ashley in a couple, I guess, keywords, you know, I would definitely use resilience, strength.

- She's just warm and kind.

She cares deeply about people.

- They talk about me as her spouse as a caregiver, but I actually feel like she's both the patient and the caregiver when it comes to our family.

She has been the one that has really kept us more mentally calm with what she's going through.

It is a strength that she has that I just don't have, and I understand that and I am so forever thankful.

It's a quality that I saw in her right away.

She has proven that to be like a number one trait and quality.

- I started feeling like something wasn't right.

I was having kind of a constellation of symptoms that you know, at first, I thought they were kind of fleeting, and it took me a while to kind of put it together.

And, you know, I would go to medical and talk to doctors about various things.

My labs looked great.

I looked very healthy and would often be met with a very dismissive response.

- She's been in so many different countries doing so many different things.

Sometimes you just don't know how your biology connects and shapes.

So, in my mind, I didn't think it was that serious.

Looking back now, I wish I would've, you know, been along with her journey a little bit sooner than I was because she was the one researching and identifying and trying to figure that out.

And no one was doing that, but her.

- I remember at one point pretty close to my diagnosis actually in 2021, I was seeing one of my primary providers, and I just out of frustration was like, "Man, isn't there some sort of just cancer panel, like testing that we could do for multiple different cancers?

You know, you got the labs, I got the blood.

Let's marry them up, right?

And just like rule some things out because something isn't right."

And the doctor looked at me and was like, you know, just like how silly is that, you know?

And I was like, "Oh, okay.

I mean, I guess, maybe."

I don't know, but I just know something's not right, you know, and I had to continue to be persistent.

I finally had a new symptom that came about that I plugged into my research probably one o'clock in the morning working long days at the Pentagon, and I think it was actually the Carcinoid Cancer Foundation website that came up.

And it talked about the five E's of carcinoid syndrome, and it shared various, the constellation of symptoms with that.

And I looked at it and I said, "Oh, my gosh, I have cancer."

(calm foreboding music) So, I then took that information to my doctor and I said, "Look, I know that this is incredibly rare and incredibly specific, but I need someone to hear me.

I think I have a neuroendocrine carcinoid tumor right about here, and I need you to take me seriously."

And she looked at me and she said, "Okay."

That still took another six months for me to get in and get through evaluations and what have you and get the diagnosis.

And again, told the surgeon, I said, "I think it's right here."

He said, "Okay, well, I'll do certain things to try and get to that area."

And they found it, and that was actually exactly where my primary tumor was.

(calm forlorn piano music) I got my diagnosis 10 days before my wife, and I made a move, coast-to-coast move, from the Pentagon to Southern California.

- We both had orders to Camp Pendleton.

We had a 10-month-old baby boy.

- [Ashley] I said, "Okay, we're moving.

We have orders.

They're called orders, not optionals."

- I was sitting in the empty apartment.

I had just signed the paperwork for the truck to leave, and then it hit me, and it hit me hard because (calm forlorn piano music continues) the emotional journey of a move that big from the East Coast to the West Coast was enough with a 10-month-old son, but now to figure out how do we transfer her care, and that's when it hit me as far as stage four cancer, what does that mean?

What does our future look like?

What does our son's future look like?

You know, and my first question to her was, how does this thing get you?

Like in the end, how are you gonn die from this?

(calm forlorn piano music continues) - I can't imagine what the burden feels like for her, and it breaks my heart to have put her in this situation.

We're new moms, she's commanding officer, and her wife has cancer.

(calm forlorn piano music continues) And she almost lost me three times this year, and she was as strong as anybody could possibly be each one of those times.

(calm forlorn piano music continues) We made the move, and I talked to the medical team that I was working with on the East Coast.

They did a warm handoff, and I spent about a month and a half just seeing every specialist for everything that possibly lit up on my PET scan.

We found out that it had spread to bone, a new region, that it was not stabilized, and at that point, I needed to make a new plan.

(calm bright piano music) (waves flowing) Ocean therapy is something that I do.

It helps train your brain to just be present.

You are this helpless being amongst those waves that has to, you know, find your way, and sometimes you have to move with the wave and sometimes you have to fight against it.

And it's one giant metaphor for life.

(calm bright piano music continues) Kind of resets the central nervous system and helps me be ready to fight when I have to surge physically and medically.

(calm bright piano music continues) So, the plan moving forward is stay solutions focused, right?

We looked at the clinical trials that were available, and I was referred to the National Cancer Institute for a combined trial with olaparib and PRRT.

So, it's a chemotherapy radiation combined trial together.

And I have already done my first treatment.

I've got three more cycles to go, and we're very optimistic as to the outcomes that we think we're gonna get from that.

So, I ended up going onto a limited duty status and transferring to Wind Warrior Battalion to stop and focus on the cancer fight.

- The way that I try to support and provide for her is now looking at the bigger picture, which is we don't know where her career is going, and we don't know what her future job is.

She has a very stringent routine now when it comes to medication and the timing of the medication combined with the timing of when she can eat with the medication.

So, it's very regimented.

I take the morning routine with our son.

That's something that I try to do as a caretaking action to alleviate some of that.

So, I do pick up a lot of things with our son, Archer, and then throughout the day, whether it's texting or calling Ashley, you know, "How are you doing?

What'd you do today?"

(bright inspiring music) - What I would tell newly diagnosed patients is you are your own best advocate.

Your endocrine cancer is 1% of cancers in America.

Just because you have an oncologist, it doesn't mean that they necessarily understand your cancer.

So, do research, do your research, know and understand your cancer the best that you can, ask the questions and be involved.

- Her being her own advocate is what led to her diagnosis.

I am firm on the fact that if she had not been going to see multiple doctors and asking for additional referrals, that she may not be here today.

What I focus on to get us through is actually something that I learned from Ashley.

It's something that we've talked about a lot where we talk about, you know, if you're focused on things that happened in the past that you cannot affect that leads to depression, if you're focused on things in the future that are too far, that haven't happened yet, you know, that could create anxiety.

So, we have something that we talk about, and we reset ourself almost weekly on it, which is you've got to live in the moment.

You've got to take everything day by day.

- You know, after waking up from the emergency surgery that I had, you know, there was a period of time, probably about two months, three months that we kind of lived in this shell of tentativeness.

We had to deliberately start doing activities to get ourselves out there again because it was scary at first.

And every single day, I wake up in a Carpe Diem mode, you know, this is it.

I got to seize the day.

And people use the phrase, "Live like you're dying," and I actually would say I disagree with that.

You need to live like you're living, being present in every moment you can possibly be present in and taking the time to go have lunch with your wife at work or planning the things that you've been talking about and that you're gonna get to later.

No, we're gonna do it now, you know?

So, we've been trying really hard to just live like we're living.

(bright inspiring music continues) (bright inspiring music continues) (bright inspiring music continues) (bright inspiring music fades)