Dr. David Fajgenbaum

And we were like, oh my gosh, like we've still got our mom here.

Like she's still here.

This is who we loved before.

But it showed me that even in the midst of literally the worst surgery you could ever go through, she was thinking about us.

She wanted to make a joke for us, which to me was just this like incredible selfless act.

But she passed away, as I mentioned, 15 months after that surgery.

And, um,

just before she passed away i promised her i would dedicate my life to trying to find treatments for patients like her i said i'm going to be a doctor i'm going to try to find drugs to help people just like you and she loved the idea she had very limited speech towards end for life and the two words she could still say were unconditional love and she said unconditional love and i was like all right i got to do this um and so i decided to go into medicine i was pretty mad i went to um

Oxford for grad school, Penn for med school, and I was on my way to fulfilling the promise to my mom.

You were 19 when that happened.

I was 19 when she passed away.

It's the worst.

And that same feeling of not wishing on anyone, I mean, for me, there was just this something that just clicked in me and just snapped, which was like –

I'm going to dedicate my life to getting revenge against these things.

Because brain cancer is one of the worst ones out there, but there are some other just horrible, horrible diseases.

And it was like, this disease just took my mom, and I'm going to spend the rest of my life, however long I've got, getting as much revenge as I can on as many of these horrible diseases as I can.

She said that she was –

Concerned about how I would be after she was gone.

Um, she was worried about me and this is a couple weeks before she passed And um, and I said mom I'm gonna be okay I'm gonna dedicate the rest of my life to trying to find treatments for people like you for patients like you and i'm gonna Just do this until I help as many people as possible and um

I knew that meant I would want to go to medical school, but I still didn't really know exactly what that meant.