David Fagenbaum
speaker
271 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 28 Feb
David Fagenbaum’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And so I think that when I was 25, I sort of first realized that we're all in overtime.
But the truth is, we're all in overtime.
And none of us know how long our overtime is going to go for, but all of us have the ability to make the most of every second in overtime.
Hi, I'm David Fagenbaum, and this is me in 2010 when all of my organs were shutting down and I was dying for the first time.
My doctors came in the room and told me, David, we've tried everything.
There's nothing more we can do.
But I was so sick, I didn't really know what my doctors meant until my family came in the room and started hugging me goodbye, and a priest read me my last rites.
I was 25 years old, a former college quarterback and a medical student who had dedicated my life to becoming a doctor after my mom died from cancer.
And yet here I was, literally dying from a disease that I'd never even heard about during medical school called Castleman disease, where your immune system attacks and shuts down your vital organs for an unknown cause.
There were no approved treatments and no cures.
But in a last-ditch effort to save me, my doctors gave me a combination of seven chemotherapies that weren't meant for my disease.
Amazingly, they worked, I survived, I returned to medical school, and I got what I think might be the worst before-and-after picture of all time.
But then I relapsed again and again.
Five times in three years, I almost died from my disease.
I'll never forget during my third relapse, when I was laying in my hospital bed with my girlfriend Caitlin and my family around me.
My gown was drenched in tears, not just because I was dying, but because of all the things that I would miss out on.
The family that I'd never had with Caitlin, the patients that I'd never treat, the cures that I'd never discover in memory of my mom.
See, until then, I'd been waiting and hoping that some researcher somewhere would discover a treatment that could save my life.
But in that moment, I realized that hope alone is not enough.
If I wanted any chance of survival, I would need to turn my hope into action to try to find a treatment to save my life.
Showing 141–160 of 271 · page 8 of 14
← Previous
Next →