Daniel B

My name’s Daniel. In January 2001, I was trying-out for the middle school “Varsity” and “Jr. Varsity” basketball teams, but when the coaches started making everyone do drills and run, I had a very hard time with the running and with keeping up with the other boys. All I was doing was wheezing, feeling tightness in my chest, and being short of breath. I brushed it off to being a “coach potato” the entire summer but it did not get any better over the course of the 3-day long try-outs. This was the beginning of a journey I will never forget. After countless blood tests, x-rays, a PET scan, a CAT scan, a MRI, 7 misdiagnoses later, I was laying on a hospital gurney facing, unbeknownst to me, a Non-Hodgkin’s T-Cell Lymphoma diagnosis and a two year-long intensive chemotherapy regimen. I am now in remission, but my story isn’t over.

I’ve since graduated High School, college, graduate school, and medical school, despite facing a heap of long term cognitive, emotional, and physical side effects, some of which only began to surface during college. However, no matter what happens, I know that I have proved to myself that I can do it and that I have at least two things going for me, which many do not have: persistence and determination. I have faced my own struggles and difficulties in my academic career, some of which would have made many give up on becoming a doctor, yet I harnessed that persistence and determination and pushed through. I’m proud to say that I’m now an Emergency Medicine physician and a champion advocate for the Teen and Young Adult (TYA) cancer community.

My passion for supporting changes in the way that TYA cancer treatment stem from the disparities and inappropriate conditions that I saw and experienced during my experience. Later, during my early survivorship, I found that my feelings were shared amongst survivors across the country, and this made me realize that change needed to happen ASAP. Now, I hope that I can make that change happen as both a veteran advocate and as a physician.