Dr. David Fajgenbaum

So the diagnosis was what's called idiopathic multicentric Castleman disease.

Castleman disease describes a group of these rare diseases where basically your immune system attacks your organs for an unknown cause.

We call it idiopathic because we don't know what the cause is.

When I heard it the first time, I vaguely remembered like I think I've heard that once in med school.

That's how rare it was.

I was like third year med student and I think I heard it once.

Yeah.

But definitely not.

I definitely wasn't familiar with it.

Sure.

Yeah.

So we were like really happy that it wasn't cancer.

We were like, yes, like this is not cancer.

You know, we thought it was lymphoma this whole time and it's not.

And then there was this, you know, really quick realization shortly thereafter that, you

that my subtype of calcium is idiopathic multisensory calcium disease actually has a worse survival rate than lymphoma does.

And that actually the thing that we were hoping it was not actually would have been better than the thing that it turned out to be.

And I was so sick when the diagnosis came in.

that the doctor told my family, we don't know if this medicine is going to work, but he's so sick that we don't think he's going to survive much longer.

You should go ahead and say goodbye to him and prepare him for not being here.