John and Ali Shadock were just a few years into their marriage — a romance that started at an Ikea furniture store — when he suddenly began experiencing severe headaches. He was 35 and healthy, and the couple had been enjoying adventures — hiking, traveling and road trips with their dogs. So a health problem, let alone a life-threatening crisis, seemed far-fetched.
Still, the , which started out of the blue in the spring of 2019 and wouldn’t go away, were concerning. “I thought they were migraines,” John Shadock, who is now 41, tells TODAY.com.
“It was excruciating beyond painful,” Ali Shadock, 48, recalls about her husband’s experience. “In the middle of the night, he’d be like, ‘Can you get me an ice pack?’ and I’d put an ice pack on his head. .
.. We thought, this isn’t right.
We have to go to the doctor.” Their primary care physician referred John Shadock for a brain scan in April 2019. At the imaging center in Kansas City, Missouri, where the couple lived at the time, they watched other people leave right after their scans, but they were asked to stay.
“'Mr. and Mrs. Shadock, the doctor needs to talk to you in the back,’” Ali Shadock recalls the staff saying.
“It was a younger doctor, and he looked like he’s about to cry. He said, ‘There’s something in your head that looks like a big tumor. You have to leave here and immediately go to the emergency room.
’” Five days later, John Shadock was on an operating table, undergoing.
