Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. The place where I would eventually meet my guardian angels in person: the doctors and nurses whose kindness and humanity made me realize I wasn’t going through this alone.

Of course, I didn’t know any of that back then. I was still under the impression that I was there for some kind of advanced physical therapy.

I limped my way there from Brooklyn with excruciating pain in my back, hoping this visit would finally bring some relief.

Dr. M entered the room with an entourage of colleagues and nurses, all dressed in white and blue.

I didn’t expect this much physical therapy, but okay. Let’s see how this goes, I thought.

Without much small talk, Dr. M told me that I had a rapidly growing hemangioblastoma in my neck, inside my spinal cord, and that it was putting pressure on the nerves affecting my right side. That’s why I was limping and dropping things with my right hand.

Then he asked me when I wanted to have surgery. This week or next?

Wait. What surgery?

“I can’t have surgery. I have a record deal to sign. Can we do it after I sign the contract?”

Dr. M looked at me. Then he looked at his colleagues.

Then, very calmly, he said:

“You may not survive that long. Definitely not until the end of the year. You don’t have a choice, my friend. We have to do this.”

When he said “my friend,” something about it hit me.

He sounded completely genuine. Not dramatic, not cold. Just genuinely concerned, almost as if he had known me forever.

Almost like a parent.

I was 24 years old, sitting there by myself, still not fully understanding the severity of what was happening.

And very slowly, it started to sink in. I am sick. Very sick.

But somehow, what hurt the most in that moment wasn’t even the diagnosis.

It was realizing that I had just lost the future I had been building toward. The reason I had left my home country, moved to New York, and worked so hard to keep going.

The record deal wasn’t just a contract. To me, it meant that everything I had worked so hard for since coming to New York was finally happening.

It had been right there in my hands, and in a split second, it all collapsed.

I could almost see the dream fading out in front of me like the closing credits of a movie.

“The end.”

The tears started coming.

Dr. M kept talking.

He explained that the surgery would be complicated and would involve several world-class specialists. If everything went well, the feeling on my right side should improve, the pain should eventually disappear, and recovery could take anywhere from six months to a year.

If I delayed or refused the surgery, I would gradually become paralyzed and could die before the end of the year.

Quite a perspective.

We scheduled the surgery for the following week.

On the way home, I kept trying to make sense of everything. Why was this happening to me? None of it made sense.

It shouldn’t have been happening.

But it was.