Pablo Torre

They didn't know?

They didn't know that you were dealing with stage four prostate cancer?

The people who have made it this deep in.

Are realizing, they're realizing one of the reasons why I was like immediately, yes, I want to understand how the fuck this guy did this.

Yeah, yeah.

It was, it was something.

I don't understand how you showed up to play that game.

Let's go back a few years.

Yeah, please.

It turns out that the story of how Brandon Jovanovic became the first person to take the stage of the Metropolitan Opera while secretly fighting stage four prostate cancer starts in 2015.

And a rheumatologist, by the way, is a doctor who specializes in autoimmune diseases and muscles and joints and connective tissues.

Some of the more confusing mysteries of the human body.

which was a positive development at that point, because Brandon could just loosen up those swollen joints and finally start moving his body again.

And then, years later, something else felt like it was breaking.

And so this is where I just need to say that I talked to one of Brandon's high school classmates, the writer Patrick Sauer, whose delightful profile of Brandon in Montana Quarterly is how I first learned about this story in the first place.

And what Patrick also made clear, if it's not clear by now, on account of Brandon's continued global itinerary, despite the fact that his lungs had apparently stopped functioning normally, is that the dude never wanted to sit out games.

Like, ever.

But after the doctors ran a battery of tests, plus blood work, over the next couple days...

they could not immediately find the cancer.

One theory was that Brandon was suddenly having an intense allergic reaction to his own Humira medication, which we mentioned before.