David Fajgenbaum

Reminiscent of When Breath Becomes Air, Chasing My Cure is a moving book about a young doctor diagnosed with a rare and little understood disease: Castleman’s Disease. Instead of giving up, after each relapse and return to health he focuses more effort and more energy into studying the disease and trying to find a cure.

At times the book felt weighted down with medical terminology, but Fajgenbaum was able to explain much of it by using football analogies. His monumental dedication to gaining a better understanding of this horrible disease is inspiring. He is a true hero.

Overall, this book offers insight and hope for people suffering from rare and misunderstood diseases as well as elicits sympathy from those of us lucky enough to be healthy.

I enjoyed this book and plan to pass it along to my uncle, who is a nurse.… (altro)

The author was a medical student when he first suffered a bout of a mysterious illness that brought him to the brink of death. Over the next several months he suffered repeated near-death episodes of the same illness. When he finally received a diagnosis, his situation did not improve much because very little was known about his disease, and there was no known cure. So he decided to do what he could to ramp up research and search for a cure.

This was a good medical memoir about a mystery illness and one fascinating person's attempts to solve the mystery.

3 stars

As an aside, the author's father is a doctor, and when the author first became ill, one of the doctors his father called upon for help was Dr. Anthony Fauci of covid fame.… (altro)

This should be an inspiring story, but I never quite connected with Fajgenbaum, maybe because of his complete single-mindedness and his incredible luck and privilege. I hope it inspires others, though, because he seems to be accomplishing real change.

> Hope cannot be a passive concept. It's a choice and a force; hoping for something takes more than casting out a wish to the universe and waiting for it to occur. Hope should inspire action

> I now realize that very few people my age are lucky enough to experience this security, the sure knowledge that she would be with me through thick and thin, fatness and baldness, through terrible times, and more.

> There are approximately seven thousand rare diseases and 350 million people afflicted by them worldwide. One in ten Americans has a rare disease; half of these are children, and about 30 percent of these children will die before their fifth birthday.

> It became even clearer to me that the approach in biomedical research of let's hope the right researcher with the right skill set applies to perform the right study at the right time was backward.

> Few incentives exist for pharmaceutical companies to invest in expensive clinical trials to determine if an already FDA-approved drug may be effective for a rare condition. And when clinical trials are performed, the data are rarely submitted to the FDA for approval in this new use. The whole process is just too expensive and time-consuming. And there are potential downsides: If the drug elicits new side effects in the trial for the rare disease, its approval for the original disease is put at risk.… (altro)

I love the passion that David C. Fajgenbaum is chasing after Castleman's Disease. This is an exciting book for me. There is a lot of technical terms in this fast reading book. I hope that there will be a glossary of them in the final copy. I am familiar with many but it is difficult to remember it all. I have multiple autoimmune diseases and pre-cancer that got me started on the terms.

Not only did the author get back on the horse to search for a cure after his manyy relapses but he is also a very strong advocate for others. I love the way that he went with his uncle when his uncle had a sarcoma. Just because the cause may not be shown by genetics or the possible treatments may be expensive is not reason to give up. Always get a second opinion by a person who is best in your disease when given dire results.

My hope is that he can continue to be in remission and further the knowledge of this rare and deadly disease.

I received an advanced reading copy of this book from the Publisher as a win from FirstReads but that in no way made a difference in my thoughts or feelings in this review.… (altro)