Dr. David Fajgenbaum

all the things that you know you'd want to do before um you know someone like my mom passes and um this was 21 years ago um did all those things and um and uh it was it was really special um and it also as you can even tell this is 21 years later it um

created such a drive in me to just say yeah i want revenge i want to do whatever i can to take this thing on yeah and um i told her i was like mama i'm gonna dedicate my life to trying to help people like you like that's just like full stop like this whole football thing that was fun these last eight years but yeah i'm gonna be a doctor and i'm gonna dedicate my life to just find treatments for this horrible thing that was taking my mom from me

That's exactly right.

And, of course, the challenge in med school is it's very much a training period, which is hard for someone like me, right?

It's like, you know, I want to take this on.

I want to make a difference.

But I'm in this period where, yeah, I've just got to train, train, train.

So I'm on my OBGYN rotation and just started noticing that I was more tired than I'd ever felt.

And I sort of always was able to run on low amounts of sleep and lots of caffeine.

But I was really, really tired, like this fatigue that I'd never felt before.

And I remember sort of like trying to just like put it out of my mind, like whatever this is is going to go away.

And I went into the hospital to take this medical school exam.

And I remember during the exam, I was like dripping sweat head to toe.

And then I was like, you've never felt like this before.

Something's going wrong.

I also had noticed these bumps appearing on my body.

They're called blood moles and they're normal as you get older, but they are abnormal to appear rapidly.

And it's like as I was studying for this exam a couple days before, I like noticed these blood moles on my body.

And so I actually handed in my exam and I just walked down the hall to the emergency department in the same hospital that I was taking the exam in.

And I just told them about my symptoms.