Seun Adebiyi’s Incredible Cancer Survivor Story
I was profoundly impacted by my conversation with cancer survivor Seun Adebiyi. The young Yale lawyer with the promising future on Wall Street lost everything he thought he was at the age of 25, when he was diagnosed with the rare cancer stem cell leukemia. His revelations about pain and suffering, life and death have stuck to my bones ever since we spoke. Read his incredible story at Guideposts.org:
In 2009, Seun Adebiyi had it all. At 25 years old, he had just graduated from Yale Law School and had become the youngest in-house attorney at the Wall Street investment banking firm Goldman Sachs. One week after his birthday and graduation, as he was heading to Salt Lake City, Utah, to train to be the first winter Olympian from Nigeria, his life changed forever.
“I’d noticed some of my lymph nodes were swollen and I went into [Yale’s] student health,” Adebiyi tells Guideposts.org. “Otherwise I was healthy, I was exercising. But the lymph nodes kept getting bigger. They were the size of golf balls.”
Adebiyi was diagnosed with stem cell leukemia, a very aggressive, very rare form of cancer that turns lymph cells into lymphoma and stems cells into scar tissue. Chemotherapy and radiation wouldn’t be enough to save his life—he needed a stem cell transplant.
“Fewer than 17% of African American patients who need a donor are able to find one,” he says. “Some say it’s a little as 5%. And finding a perfect match is not a guarantee of a cure. That’s just the first step. I was shocked that my ethnicity was playing such a huge role in my cancer and whether I’d survive.”
Adebiyi became outraged by his shocking and helpless prognosis. Then he decided to take back some control.
Read the rest at Guideposts.org.