Dr. David Fajgenbaum

Yeah, this is when I was 25 years old and kept getting more and more sick.

And so at a certain point, my family had a priest come in the room and read me my last rites because they were sure that I wasn't going to make it.

And fortunately, right around that time, they did something called a lymph node biopsy where they cut out my lymph nodes because they thought I had cancer of the lymph nodes called lymphoma.

And when the doctors looked at it, they said, we don't think this is lymphoma.

We think it's something called idiopathic multicentric Castleman disease, which I was a med student.

I'd still never even heard of it before, but basically it's a disease where your immune system attacks your organs until you die.

It just, it just destroys you and kills you.

Um, but the only thing they knew to try was chemotherapy.

They were like, well, if your immune system is trying to kill you, maybe we'll try to kill the immune system with some chemo.

And so they gave me chemo in this like sort of last ditch effort right around the time I had my last rights read to me.

And

It just sort of kicked in just in time, and I survived that.

But then I would go on to have a bunch of relapses.

That's right.

Yeah, I mean, it was heartbreaking.

I was devastated.

I had this amazing girlfriend, Caitlin, that I wanted to have a life with.

I'd made this promise to my mom I was going to treat all these patients and I was going to discover all these treatments I wasn't going to be able to follow through on.

I just felt like there was just so much that I was never going to experience that I wanted to so badly.

And I didn't have any regrets about what I did in life, but I just had this feeling of regret about things I never would get to do or that I never got to do.