Dr. David Fajgenbaum

I'm going to keep fighting.

I got this amazing girlfriend, Caitlin.

I want to get married to her.

I don't care if I go shortly.

Well, I didn't want to go shortly after I got married to her, but I wanted to get married to her.

I wanted to have this family.

I wanted to

um, to do these things.

And so I think that there is, there is a real ability, um, to keep fighting.

But of course, for me, I, the chemotherapy was necessary.

It's not like I could have willed myself into doing this.

It was that, you know, chemotherapy, get my diseases under control and I could keep fighting.

Did you think about what would happen after death?

I did.

Um, I, uh, you know, I said a lot of prayers, um, and I, uh, you know,

I spent so much of that time when I was on my deathbed sort of sad about the things that I was going to leave behind here that I spent a lot less time forward looking into what was going to happen afterwards.

It was a lot more just sadness about what was behind me.

But so let's move on.

Yeah, so I make it through that six month period somehow, some way, and I got put on an experimental drug, a drug that was going into clinical trials for my disease, my rare disease, this disease called Castleman's with, you know, a thousand patients diagnosed a year in the U.S., like super rare.

Um, and, uh, we thought it was gonna keep me in remission.