A dedicated husband spent days on his feet helping with his wife’s cold capping so she could keep her hair during chemo.
Ashley Cass, 25, from Lenexa, Kansas, discovered a lump in her chest in July 2025, and assumed it was nothing to worry about.
But after her mom encouraged her to check it out to be safe, the results diagnosed Ashley with breast cancer, turning her husband Jonny’s life upside down.
They left their home in California to move back to Kansas for treatment, were given two weeks to carry out IVF before Ashley started chemo, and decided to get married in that time as well.
After their wedding on October 11, Ashley started her chemotherapy on October 14, and the one thing she was worried about was losing her hair, as she wanted to keep her life as normal as possible.
She decided to go through with cold capping, where a cold cap is placed on the head during treatment, restricting the blood flow to the scalp and reducing the metabolic rate of hair follicle cells, protecting them from damage caused by chemotherapy drugs.
Jonny, 25, immediately decided that he wanted to step up as the cold capper, as it allowed him to feel like he was helping Ashley with her treatment.
The work itself was tough: he needed to cold cap Ashley for one hour before infusions started, all throughout infusions, and for five hours after, equaling a total of eight to 10 hours of cold capping every chemotherapy session.
The cap needs to be changed every 25 minutes, so Jonny was constantly on his feet, taking the cap out of the cooler from beneath three layers of dry ice after 20 minutes; checking the temperature to make sure it was -30 degrees Celsius; and then, five minutes later, taking off the old cold cap and putting the new one on.
Over six rounds of chemotherapy, Ashley estimates Jonny was helping her with cold capping for around 60 hours, and she later shared a tribute video to her husband’s efforts on social media.
Days of hard work paid off for Jonny and Ashley, as Ashley was able to keep a large amount of her hair and, on January 29, her 25th birthday, rang the bell to say she was cancer free, at the University Of Kansas Cancer Center, in Overland Park.
Ashley now has a double mastectomy scheduled for March and will likely have radiation after surgery and targeted drugs until October.
Speaking of Jonny’s cold capping work, she said: “I didn’t want to lose my hair because I wanted to try to keep life as normal as possible – I wanted to feel like myself.
“I wanted to be able to work and go to the grocery store without being the girl with cancer.
“I knew having my hair would help my mental health so much, just looking and feeling like myself as much as possible.
“When I decided I wanted to cold cap, Jonny immediately stepped up to be my cold capper, he was excited to learn how to do it and be involved.
“Cold capping helped Jonny as well, because it gave him a way to physically be involved in my treatment.
“It was his own way of fighting cancer and it made us feel like we were in this together.
“It also gave him an outlet to help me in a really important way, which was so good for him in a time when you can feel so helpless.
“It’s hard to be happy or get too excited about things while you’re going through cancer treatment because you don’t want to get your hopes up.
“That’s how I felt after washing my hair, even if I didn’t lose a lot of hair I didn’t want to celebrate because I could still lose all of it next week.
“Jonny always reminds me to keep loving life and to keep living joyfully.
“I felt so seen in that moment, because Jonny knew I was happy and proud of myself even if I couldn’t show it he celebrated for me.
“He’s always shown up for me in big ways and in small ways, and that was an example of how he shows up for me in small ways.”
