It's a conversation Andrew Keating never planned to have with his three children.

I have had the the dying conversation with my with my oldest son, Steve, and he actually took it really well.

He was like, okay, so you're you're sick and you're going to die and you're going to go to heaven.

And I was like, yeah.

Andrew's oldest, Steve is only seven.

I don't think that the finality has set in for any of my kids, but they at least know what's what's happening.

Difficult for his children to understand and challenging for his family to come to terms that just four years ago, at the age of 31, Andrew was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer.

Oh, that means I'm going to die.

The cancer has now spread to other parts of Andrew's body.

So I've got tumors on my liver.

I've got some, some small tumors in my lungs, some tumors in my lymph nodes.

In 2009, Andrew served his first tour in Afghanistan with the Air Force and would be deployed two more times.

That was actually a really fun time.

One of the greatest leaders that I've encountered was my team leader.

So, Chris, that's, that's, you.

His duties there, put him in hazardous situations.

Why I get VA disability is because my doctor wrote a letter, saying that it was more likely than not that, the burn pits caused my my cancer.

Medically retired, Andrew's life is basically divided into two parts when he's on chemotherapy and when he's not.

I visit with a doctor on Monday.

They check my blood and they give me the green light to get chemo.

Tuesday, I sit in a chair for four hours.

And then they send me home with a chemo pump, which is, slow dose of chemo.

And I get that over Wednesday, and then I get the pump taken off on Thursday.

Looking back on his diagnosis, Andrew says there weren't clear signs something was wrong.

Although he did have stomach pain before his diagnosis.

Maybe, a year before I got checked out and I did the the manly thing of just grin and bear it, you know.

He thought it was likely just gallstones, something a friend had recently experience.

By the time I felt the pain in my in my liver I was already on stage four cancer, so there was really no warning.

What he tells people now when something feels off in their bodies, go get checked.

There's a lot of people out there that don't want to create a fuss and everything like that.

And my, message to them would be if you don't go the worst that could happen is that you could die.

So, you should probably go get checked out.

Andrew doesn't know how much time he has left with his wife and kids, and while that's tough for him to think about, he's treating his cancer as a gift.

God's going to work through the best and the worst situations.

He's going to use everything for his good.

And, if anybody else is going through cancer, just take solace in the fact that, you know, God's going to use it.