HERMITAGE, Pa. — Sitting in a recliner inside his Western Pennsylvania home, Herbert “Herb” Weiser talked with his friends and family who had gathered there to support him.

“Call me Herb,” he said with a laugh. “It’s a family name, but I’m the only Herb left. There was my grandfather, my father and then me.”

On Feb. 6, Weiser was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.

“They told him he has 6 to 12 weeks to live if he did nothing,” his cousin Vesta Weiser said. “If he did treatments, they told him would have 9 to 13 months to live. But we aren’t going to believe that.”

“No,” Herb Weiser said. “I’m going to beat right through that. I’m too strong. I’m not a quitter.”

Two days before Christmas, Weiser said he was coughing so hard doctors thought he might have cracked a rib from the ordeal. They suggested he get X-rays, but they found nothing wrong, he said.

“The very next day I ended up in the emergency room, and they said I had a touch of pneumonia,” Herb said. “They put me on all these different antibiotics, cough syrup with codeine, all kinds of stuff, and nothing seemed to be working.”

He was on antibiotics the entire month of January with no signs of improvement. When he started having trouble breathing, his bride of six months told him it wasn’t something he could continue to ignore.

“I kept telling him to go back to the hospital, and he wouldn’t go,” Weiser’s wife Melony said.

“I’m stubborn,” Herb Weiser said.

It wasn’t until a friend, who is a nurse, told Weiser there must be something more going on and he should go back to the doctor for more testing.

“They did a CAT scan, and it revealed there was a tumor in his lungs, and they found several tumors in his liver and brain,” Melony Weiser said. “They determined it was lung cancer, and it had already spread pretty rapidly throughout his body. They claim he probably had it for about a year before he showed any symptoms.”

The news was a shock for the newlyweds.

“It knocks the wind out of you,” Melony Weiser said. “We were dumbfounded. The ride home was very quiet because neither one of us knew what to say to each other.”

Weiser, 50, said he originally thought the doctor’s paperwork had been mixed up, but when they went for more testing doctors discovered the tumors had doubled in number within a week’s time. Herb said he had been a smoker for more than 20 years, but quit last November.

“Apparently I should have quit a long time ago,” he said. “Finally I quit, and look where I am at.”

Things had recently turned around for Herb Weiser who had remained a bachelor until he met his wife. 

The couple knew each other through family and mutual friends and were acquaintances on Facebook, but when Herb Weiser’s mother died of ovarian cancer in 2014, the couple started to talk via the social media platform.

“He lost his mom on March 17, and exactly one month later I lost the guy I was with at the time,” Melony Weiser said. “He was putting things up on Facebook about how much he missed his mom, and I started commenting that I knew where he was coming from because I had lost someone too.”

The couple exchanged their marriage vows on June 18, 2016, in Weiser’s backyard. Receiving a death sentence so soon after finding happiness is something the couple says is difficult to grasp.

“He finally got the wife and family he has always wanted, and then we find all this out,” Melony Weiser said. “It’s just devastating.”

“Every day it gets hard,” Herb Weiser said. “Knowing you ain’t got much time to live.”

“I ain’t no quitter,” he said.

But Weiser said he is uncertain about his new family’s future.

“They say I have a couple more weeks of sick pay, but after that basically everything is on her and my stepdaughter to make ends meet,” he said.

For now, however, the couple said they are more focused on fighting Weiser’s cancer.

“None of us knows when our last day is,” Melony Weiser said. “He was given somewhat of a date, and I think it is worse knowing than not knowing.”

Herb Weiser said he would rather not know.

“I’m going to last a lot longer than that,” he said. “With my positive attitude, I’m not going to let anything get me down. Right now I actually feel pretty good, but the chemo is going to drag me down.”

“I feel fine except for that C-word. I don’t like it. Cancer is not welcome in this house.”

Miller writes for the Sharon, Pennsylvania Herald.