Dr. David Fajgenbaum

And part of that was because for the previous 15 years of my life, I was obsessed with wanting to be a college quarterback.

And why?

You know, it's...

So I grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, where college sports are really big and NC State had a football team and I grew up sort of like loving their team.

But I think maybe more than anything is once I started playing football and I started like... I'm biased, but I think football is unique among team sports in that...

You connect with your teammates in such a way because literally like your health and your life is like on the line.

If someone else doesn't do the thing to protect you, you don't need to protect them as a quarterback.

Yes.

And so I just fell in love with football.

I mean, as a kid, I just was in love with it.

If you could have seen my walls when I was growing up, literally every corner of every wall in my bedroom was covered with charts measuring like how far I could throw a football, how fast I could run all with the goal of getting better.

I get my dream.

I get this opportunity to go to Georgetown to play football.

And it was the dream where it was like, okay, I can go to a great university that has a health science program so I can keep studying health science and I can play football.

I really love the coaches there.

But then I got to school and I was there for only a couple weeks before I got this just horribly devastating call.

My dad called and said,

I said, David, your mom has brain cancer.

You need to come home right away.

So I immediately went back home to Raleigh.