One year ago today, I “rang the bell” at the Skip Viragh Outpatient Center after I finished my 12th and final round of chemotherapy. Nurses and staff cheered me on, I was in tears, their compassion was overwhelming.
My journey through diagnosis, surgery, and therapy was fairly typical, there are over 106,000 new cases like mine every year. I was lucky to be diagnosed early enough and to be supported by an amazing team of surgeons, nurses, and oncologists from Johns Hopkins Hospital. I was also fortunate to begin in decent physical shape and I am blessed with an amazing wife who also happens to be a cancer researcher at NCI. Even my dog was helping, her insistence on long daily walks, kept me focused on the important things in life – live every day by putting one foot in front of the other. Even the side effects of the chemotherapy weren’t too bad, too many people suffer way, way more than I did. As one nurse said to me, I was the luckiest unlucky SOB who had to go through this.
I learned quite a few things about myself. For example, I have true friends, friends who knew my infusion schedule better than I did, friends who counted how many rounds were left, friends who made plans for our future, kicked my ass, sent me very dark jokes, and challenged me to “get it done”. I learned that I fear dying but not death, and what matters is how we use the one life we have.
Ringing that bell was going to start something new, something that I felt passionate about, something I had never done before, something that would be risky and rewarding and ultimately will make the world a better place. I had never started a company from scratch, so now was the time to do it.
GaiaXus was incorporated on 11/1/2021 with nothing but a terrible PowerPoint slide. Just one year later, we have an amazing team, some funding, we have prototypes, we are presenting early results at a major conference in DC and we are getting ready for a series of pilots and trials over the winter. We have achieved this because we are supported by an incredible network of coaches, experts, teachers, engineers, scientists, and outdoor enthusiasts who share our vision that we can fix this planet with science, we can learn by teaching, and that there is nothing more beautiful than understanding nature.
I can not express how grateful I am for the amazing support that we have received from the community.
So, with this: Thank you. Thank you all for being part of this journey, thank you for your support, passion, and commitment, thank you for believing in the vision, and thank you for taking a chance with us.
And yes, f**k cancer.