I was 11 years old and woke up from a bad dream one night with heart palpitations and shortness of breath. My mom took me to see our pediatrician. She had recently read an article about Michael Phelps speculating that he might have a genetic disorder, Marfan syndrome.

This has never been confirmed. But he does have some physical characteristics associated with it — very tall stature, with long arms, fingers, and toes. Like me.

The pediatrician didn’t think I had Marfan syndrome. But he said if my mom was concerned, I could see a cardiologist. The cardiologist didn’t think I had it. Neither did the ophthalmologist or the orthopedic doctor.

But my mom still had this weird feeling.

Finally, she found out there was a brand-new genetic test for Marfan syndrome. I had the test, and it came back positive. There’s something to be said there about a mother’s intuition.

As a connective tissue disorder, Marfan syndrome can affect pretty much every body system, but the heart is usually the primary concern. Typically, it’s passed down from a parent, but it can also be a de novo mutation, as it was for me.

The first thing that hit me was I couldn’t play basketball anymore. Guidelines recommend that patients with Marfan syndrome be restricted from high-contact sports. Basketball was my favorite thing in the world — the way I made friends and my whole identity. Without it, I didn’t know who I was or where I fit in.

That was my first taste of life with a chronic condition, and I soon realized this was a new reality. I had to have an echocardiogram or MRI once a year to check my heart for aortic enlargement. I had to go to eye doctors to check for retinal detachments. I eventually started medications such as beta-blockers that gave me fatigue. My thinking changed from, Oh no, I can’t play sports anymore to I might need major surgery on my heart later in life. This is a big deal.

I’ve found that people who go through things like this either want to get as far away from medicine as possible or dive into it. The thing that made me run to medicine rather than away from it was a new cardiologist, Dr Greene.

When I met Dr Greene, as a teenager, I was anxious about everything. I had read that any high-impact hit to the chest could cause my heart to explode. Doing almost any physical activity made me feel unsafe. The first time I saw Dr Greene, I told him some of my friends were going to a lake to go tubing.

“Can I go?” I asked him. “What if I hit the water really hard?”

He looked at me and said, “You’re not a ticking time bomb. It’s not your job to worry about all these things. That’s my job. If there are problems that arise or things I don’t want you to do, I’m going to tell you about them. But ultimately, I’m going to take care of you.”

I felt a huge weight come off in that moment.

That was when I fell in love with the idea that maybe my condition was something I could use to help other people. And maybe medicine could replace my lost passion for sports.

In medical school, I shared my experience with my classmates but rarely with patients. It gets ingrained in you as a medical student that you must always be “professional” in front of your patients without showing vulnerability or emotion.

Then I was diagnosed with cancer.

I was studying for my second board exam and felt nauseous. A lot. I thought it was just anxiety and would go away once I got past the test.

I got through the test. I was happy with my scores. But I still wasn’t feeling right. I was losing weight and starting to have some pain in the right upper quadrant.

One night, my wife convinced me to go to the emergency room. I explained to the doctor that I was having a little pain around my liver. Maybe I had gallstones? He said, “Let me pull the ultrasound machine in here and take a look.”

I can read a basic ultrasound, so I could see him looking around. He looked up at my liver and stopped. He started asking questions: “Have you had night sweats?” Yes. “Are you losing weight?” Yes. I knew these questions. They were for cancer screening.

He said, “I see a little something on your liver. It’s probably benign. But I wouldn’t be able to sleep if I didn’t send you for a CT scan tonight.” He told me his shift was ending in about 30 minutes, so another doctor would take over my care.

It took at least 3 hours to get the results back from the CT scan. Around midnight, the same doctor came back in. The first thing he said was, “I need to go grab a chair.” I just knew. This was not good.

He told me, “There are multiple lesions in your liver. I talked to a radiologist, and it does look like this may be cancer.”

I was in shock. I mean, as much health anxiety as I’ve had in my life, I knew that 26-year-olds aren’t supposed to get cancer. It was a lot to process. But I’ll always be grateful for that doctor who broke the news. He stayed for hours after his shift and waited with me until I was transferred to the larger hospital.

It was the same hospital where I’d done all my clinicals. I had walked those halls, helping treat patients, and now I was there in the cancer unit. It was a very strange feeling.

After the biopsies and esophagogastroduodenoscopy, the diagnosis was stage IV esophageal cancer, which had spread to my liver. I took a year off school and started chemotherapy.

Eventually, I got to my current state where I don’t feel well for 3-5 days when I’m on chemotherapy. But then I’ve got 10 good days after that. I wanted to use those days to do what I love, something that brings me purpose.

I worked out a plan with my medical school where my rotations are going to be longer, but I’ll still be able to graduate on time and take off the days that I need for chemotherapy or surgeries.

I’ve come back with this renewed purpose in medicine. Before, I felt I could connect with a specific set of patients with sports injuries and things like that. But when you go through something like cancer — the procedures, blood draws, scans, the financial worries, and the difficult conversations with doctors and family — that opens a door for me to connect with almost any patient that walks into my clinic.

When I was first diagnosed, I had a therapist who had worked with veterans. She told me that the bond between patients with cancer is similar to the bond of soldiers who have been through war. Whenever I walk into the cancer center for my infusions, there’s this connection with everyone sitting there, knowing how hard it is to go through something like this.

I’m open about my diagnosis. I don’t walk in and say, “Hey, my name’s Hunter. I’m a med student, and I have cancer.” But if a patient has had cancer on their chart or is going through treatment, I might ask, “Where do you get your infusions?” A lot of times it’s the same place that I do, so I say, “Maybe I’ll see you there one day.” They’re usually surprised because I’m young, but we recognize: This is another fighter. This is another survivor.

People often say that someone “lost their battle with cancer.” I believe strongly that we shouldn’t use that phrase. People who have passed away from cancer can still win a battle against it based on how they impacted people during that time. I have known people who passed away, but they certainly won battles.

I also believe there is power in using your emotions and sharing them with patients. When I was first diagnosed, a gastroenterology fellow came into my room who I had worked with as a medical student. He recognized me and suddenly got very teary-eyed. He said, “I really want to make sure that we take good care of you. You’re one of us.”

A few days later, he texted me apologizing for getting emotional. I wrote back, “I can’t tell you how much that meant to me as a patient and how safe it made me feel.” The fact that someone cared enough to show emotion.

Being on both sides of medicine, I can see why there is sometimes a disconnect. As a doctor, you’ve got 30 patients. You order a scan, put it into the computer, and say, “I’m going to look at this an hour before the patient comes in, and we’ll talk about it.”

But when I have a scan, that’s all I’m thinking about for 2 weeks prior. As a patient, you are living with a diagnosis, and with something like cancer, it touches every part of your life.

I’m about to finish medical school now. We recently did a session on how to break bad news and the acronyms and phrases to use. But as I shared with my classmates, the biggest thing I remember about the doctor who diagnosed me was not that he used the perfect words or that he was the most professional. It was the fact that he stayed with me, even when his shift was over. He gave me his time.

So far, my cancer has responded very well to treatment, and I’ve had some more invasive surgeries. Statistics tell me it’s unlikely that I’ll ever be completely cancer free, but on paper, there’s a path to get there.

My wife, my family, and I hold out hope. And for now, it’s healing for me to help heal other people.

Hunter Bohon is a fourth-year medical student at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine in Greenville, South Carolina. He recently matched into family medicine at Prisma Health in Greer, South Carolina.