Too Young for Cancer: Casey Kroner’s Story

Ashton and Casey Kroner, co-founders of the Veteran Cancer Network. Photo courtesy of Ashton and Casey Kroner.

For five months, Casey Kroner told the VA something was wrong. An ultrasound came back read as a hematoma. By the time a civilian ER found the truth, according to Ashton and Casey Kroner, it was a grapefruit-sized, late-stage tumor.

The text came through at three in the morning. Ashton Kroner was home in Illinois when her phone lit up with two words from her husband: "I have cancer." She was already awake, already braced, because Casey had spent the last several hours in a civilian emergency room outside Chicago, chasing an answer the VA had refused to give him for the better part of five months.

A young nurse had actually told him he had a tumor, nothing more specific than that. Casey heard cancer anyway. He texted his wife before he had the full picture, because in his mind there was no other way a growing mass next to his kidney was going to end. Ashton read it, called him back, and started making a plan before she even had her shoes on.

"I have to fix this mode," she said of that morning. "Everything is completely outside of your control, except for the fact that when I got to the hospital, I could do something."

What she did was drop her son and their dogs at her parents' house, drive to the hospital, and tell the staff she was a nurse so they would let her take her husband to Rush University, the Chicago hospital where she actually worked. She knew the doctors there. She knew she could push if she needed to. Within twenty-four to forty-eight hours, surgeons had removed the primary tumor. They had a treatment plan mapped out before the pathology report even came back.

By the time anyone operated, Casey's cancer was no longer just a diagnosis. It was late stage testicular cancer that had already migrated to a lymph node beside his left kidney and grown to the size of a grapefruit. Testicular cancer runs on a scale that tops out at stage three. Casey was a 3A. "If it got a little bit worse, honestly, I might not be here today," he said.

"If it got a little bit worse, honestly, I might not be here today."

The two of them had been telling this story to Congress and county chambers for months by the time they sat down with Veteran Excellence Magazine, and it always starts the same place: the winter of 2021, when the pain got bad enough that Casey started showing up at the VA in North Chicago every three weeks. Muscle spasms, they told him. Irritable bowel syndrome. At one point, a provider suggested it was in his head. An ultrasound of his testicle came back read as hematomas, even though Ashton, who works in healthcare but is not a doctor, looked at the same report and could see what looked like tumors sitting right there in the notes.

"I remember laying down in bed one day and Casey comes over and he's like, will you take a look at my ball?" Ashton said. "I was like, I don't want to see that hairy thing. Go to a real doctor. I'm not a doctor, I'm not a nurse, I just work in the healthcare guild."

She was already irritated with how the VA was handling him before the diagnosis even landed, and she does not soften that in hindsight. Casey remembers exactly how muddled the news was when it reached him. "They said I had a tumor at three, four in the morning," he said. "I didn't put it together. I was like, it could be benign, it could be whatever. So I texted her. It said cancer. They didn't tell me that." A nurse had actually used the word tumor, not cancer. Casey filled in the rest himself, and Ashton got the blunter version before either of them had the full picture.

Ashton is candid about how unreal the moment felt, even with her own healthcare background. "It was kind of surreal," she said, "because you don't think of a thirty-four-year-old having cancer. You think, this is an old person's disease, or somebody that smoked and drank their life away. You don't really think of him as my husband."

He did, eventually, on his own, in the middle of the night, at a civilian hospital that ran the CT scan the VA had not. That scan is what got him to Rush, what got him operated on fast, and what likely kept a three-month cancer fight from turning into something much longer.

A Texas Farm, an Upstate Placeholder, and a Dragon on TV

Ashton grew up on a farm in Texas, tending livestock and hay before her parents divorced and her mother eventually remarried and moved the family to New York, chasing her stepfather's job. Ashton thought she was headed to Michigan and graduating there instead. The move to New York, as she put it, was mostly a placeholder, one that happened to line up with watching her stepbrother graduate Marine Corps boot camp.

She had wanted to join since she was seven or eight years old, after seeing a Marine Corps commercial on her first television, the one with a knight battling a dragon up a mountain. "That's so cool," she remembers thinking. "I want to do that." Her mother did not agree. She grounded Ashton from even talking about the military as a kid and later paid her ten dollars a week in allowance on the condition that she drop the subject. It took her father intervening during her junior year of high school, signing the enlistment paperwork himself, before she could join.

Casey's path was shorter and, in his telling, a lot less dramatic. He grew up in Jasper, Texas, the kind of small town where you describe yourself by the bigger town nearby. The options after high school were sawmill work, construction, or the recruiting station. The Army recruiter's office happened to be closed the day he went looking. The Marine Corps office was not. Two weeks after signing, he was at boot camp in San Diego, in the first part of May, which he does not recommend to anyone.

From the Kroners' Marine Corps years. Photo courtesy of Ashton and Casey Kroner.

Team Lioness and a River in Al Taqaddum

Ashton deployed to Iraq in 2009 as a field radio operator attached to 1st Battalion, 8th Marines, and volunteered for Team Lioness, a program that placed women Marines alongside infantry units so they could speak with Iraqi women, something male Marines were culturally barred from doing. Assignments ran four to eight weeks at a stretch, capped short because insurgent groups had put bounties on the women's heads.

Her clearest memory of that first dismounted patrol is a river near Al Taqaddum, the base Marines called TQ. Women and children were gathering drinking water from it. Further down the bank, someone was using the bathroom in the same water. Further still, someone was washing a truck and livestock in it. "That was my very first encounter with how other people live," Ashton said. "I can just go to the kitchen faucet, turn it on, grab a glass of water. People over there don't get that opportunity."

Casey deployed the same year in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, working satellite communications, and stayed on base the entire time while Ashton went outside the wire. He does not describe it as easy. "You don't know what kind of information is going through your terminal," he said. "One little ding, one sandstorm, and the whole thing could shut down, and you'd be held responsible because it's under your watch." Both of them describe the deployment as a kind of Groundhog Day, the same routine on repeat, punctuated by stretches where adrenaline spiked without warning.

In the field during the Kroners' Marine Corps service. Photo courtesy of Ashton and Casey Kroner.

They had already crossed paths back in the States, in the same communications battalion, one platoon apart. Casey learned sign language to get Ashton's attention and bulked up fifty pounds on protein and creatine while she was on a Team Lioness rotation he begged her not to take. It worked. They have been married sixteen years.

Coming home changed both of them, though Ashton felt it more visibly. "You're not around other kids for the most part on deployment," she said. "Crying babies was kind of like a foreign sound to me." She remembers freezing up over a crying baby in a restaurant. "I was like, oh, I can't be around this anymore. I need to leave." Casey had a version of the same reaction coming home from Afghanistan, in Ashton's telling. "I freaked out in the Walmart," she said, describing that moment. "I was like, getting you out of here, you know? But that happens."

Years later, on a panel discussion built around the Team Lioness documentary, Ashton's mother described watching that shift happen in real time, the transformation from the happy-go-lucky kid who left to the daughter who came home different. "I didn't realize that I had changed," Ashton said, "but those that have known me for years, they recognize it."

What Cancer Did to a Marriage

Ashton was still carrying some of that when Casey got sick, and she does not dress up what her marriage looked like right before his diagnosis. She had built a career in nonprofit work, traveling constantly, and her own PTSD from Iraq was, by her own account, still a little out of whack. "I did not want to be at home with the family," she said. "I would just always bombard myself with work, just so I wanted to keep my mind busy. I didn't realize how big of an impact that had on our marriage at the time."

Being confined to a hospital room with her husband, first for surgery and later for chemotherapy and a bout of sepsis that landed him back in the hospital right before Christmas, forced a conversation neither of them had been having. "When you're forced to be in a hospital room and you've already talked about the diagnosis and everything," Ashton said, "there's not really anything else to talk about. You start kind of reconnecting, I guess you could say, kind of like in those early days when we were in Iraq, just driving each other nuts."

"We did not want this to be our end story."

Ashton does not describe the diagnosis as purely a low point, either, and she says so with the same dark humor that runs through most of their conversation. "I say it's the best worst thing that ever happened to us," she said. "At the time, the worst thing that ever happened. The best worst thing." Casey backs her up on it. "She's speaking the truth there," he said. "When something bad happens, no matter if you're military or not, either you buckle down and support each other, or you won't make it. We were lucky enough that we saw the writing on the wall."

Ashton and Casey Kroner. Photo courtesy of Ashton and Casey Kroner

Ashton also did not let the misdiagnosis go quietly. She had worked at a nonprofit PTSD clinic for veterans out of Rush, and a former medical director there had since moved into a psychiatry role at the VA. She called him from Casey's hospital room, in the middle of the COVID-era visitor restrictions, and asked him to elevate the case. By her account, the case became a teaching example inside the facility, and the urologist she believes misread Casey's original scans no longer works there.

Building the Network They Wished Existed

Once Casey reached remission, the couple went looking for the kind of support network that should have existed while he was sick. Casey remembers the search coming up almost empty. "We made too much to qualify for financial assistance," he said. "We made too much to get free food or whatnot. We didn't have a great support system, because we didn't know what to look for." Ashton pushes back on that last part a little, even now. "I would actually disagree with you on that," she said. "I think we had a wonderful support system." What they agree on is that most cancer resources are built around either children or the elderly, not a thirty-four-year-old veteran with a family and a landscaping business to run.

"We're seeing pre-nine-eleven veterans getting cancer in their sixties, seventies, and eighties," Ashton said. "Our post-nine-eleven veterans are getting cancer in their twenties, thirties, and forties. If you just look at the statistics, we're thirty percent more likely to get cancer because we served in the military. That's crazy to me. Why aren't we doing something to combat that?"

The idea for an organization of their own sat unspoken for years, by Casey's account, going back to the week he spent in the hospital with sepsis. "We talked about this over four years ago," he said, "and we just never really put the connections together." It finally moved from idea to commitment at the Military Influencer Conference in Atlanta, where the couple met another veteran who had already ridden a bicycle across several states to raise awareness for PTSD. "Right after that, we were motivated," Casey said. "We were like, you know what, no one's doing something. Let's do it." They spent months operating under a Marion County, Florida nonprofit called the Vet Resource Center before launching independently in December as the Veteran Cancer Network, now based in Green Cove Springs.

The two co-founders split the mission along the lines of their own strengths. Ashton, who has spent her career in veteran-facing nonprofit work, focuses on the policy side: identifying what service members are exposed to, from asbestos to burn pits to contaminated water, and pushing to move cancer screening for veterans from an age-based standard to a risk-based one. Casey, who calls himself the background character in most rooms, has become the organization's storyteller, collecting the accounts of other veterans and caregivers navigating a cancer diagnosis without a map.

Casey Kroner at a Veteran Cancer Network event. Photo courtesy of Ashton and Casey Kroner.

Central to their pitch is a blood test called Galleri, a multi-cancer early detection screen that checks for signals from more than fifty cancer types from a single draw. TRICARE now covers it for beneficiaries fifty and older with documented risk factors, including service-related exposure to hazardous materials, though the Kroners argue the age floor is exactly the kind of barrier that would have caught Casey's cancer years earlier if it had not existed. "We shouldn't have to wait until we're forty-five to get screened," Ashton said. "It should go off your symptoms and your exposure, not your age."

Casey, for his part, has settled into life as a stay-at-home father while Ashton runs point on the advocacy side, a division of labor he describes with the same shrug he brings to most of the story. He is closing in on five years of remission this December. The next chapter of the Kroners' advocacy took them a lot farther than a hospital room, and a lot slower than a car. That story, a thousand-mile bicycle ride from Florida to the steps of the Capitol, continues in the next issue of Veteran Excellence Magazine.

Resources

Veteran Cancer Network | https://veterancancernetwork.org/ | The Kroners' nonprofit, connecting veterans and families with early detection resources and advocacy updates.

TRICARE Galleri Multi-Cancer Early Detection Test | https://www.tricare.mil/CoveredServices/IsItCovered/GRAIL-Galleri | Official TRICARE coverage details for the blood test that screens for signals from more than 50 cancer types.

Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) | https://iava.org/ | Nonpartisan advocacy organization supporting post-9/11 veterans, including health care access issues.

D'Aniello Institute for Veterans and Military Families (IVMF) | https://ivmf.syracuse.edu/ | Syracuse University institute offering free entrepreneurship and leadership training for veterans and military spouses.

VA Office of Inspector General | https://www.va.gov/oig/ | Public oversight reports on VA medical center performance, including oncology care.

Veterans Crisis Line, dial 988 then press 1 | https://www.veteranscrisisline.net/ | Confidential, 24-hour support for veterans and their families in crisis.