Finding post-traumatic growth

Fabian took us back to the time when his existential crisis collided with his cancer diagnosis and how he was able to pull through 900 days of chemo with a vision to support other cancer people struggling with mental health.

You can download the War On Cancer app on your phone and check out the amazing Clinical Trial Finder feature. You can also connect with Fabian on Instagram @fabianbolin. 

Please follow the podcast if you are enjoying the show. I would also be grateful if you can leave an honest rating and review so I know if I am serving the interests and needs of you listeners out there.

Have topic suggestions or feedback about the show?  Contact me on Instagram or email me at talkaboutcancerpodcast@gmail.com. 

Thank you for listening!

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My reflections on the conversation:

What’s really important about Fabian’s story is that oftentimes when you get a cancer diagnosis, it doesn’t mean that whatever crisis you were already facing in your personal life just gets put on hold. As we heard, crises can have a way of amplifying each other and making the experience more complex and difficult to untangle. I was really impressed with how Fabian was able to pull apart what was helping him vs not in the middle of such an intense emotional rollercoaster. It shows how much work he has put into processing his own experiences, and ultimately, channeling the learnings towards building the War on Cancer platform to support other cancer people struggling with mental health. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:03

Hey everybody, this is Serena, your host for the Talk About Cancer Podcast, where I talk to cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers about their experiences dealing with cancer. We're all given treatment plans when cancer shows up in our lives, but no one gives us plans for navigating the hard conversations we need to have and the relationship challenges that will inevitably come up. This podcast is meant to help fill that gap for those dealing with cancer. I think of it as an on-demand audio support group where listeners can hear about others' experiences managing similar problems, but most importantly, get insights about how our loved ones are feeling on this journey none of us signed up for, and better understand where they may be needing support. In today's episode, Fabian took us back to the time when his existential crisis collided with his cancer diagnosis and how he was able to pull through 900 days of chemo with a vision to support other cancer people struggling with mental health. Let's dive into his story now, and I will check back in with you at the end.

SPEAKER_00: 1:29

All right. First of all, thank you, Serena, for uh inviting me. My name is Fabian Bolin. I am a Swedish male in my early mid-30s, 34, and I'm the CEO and co-founder of War on Cancer. We're a health tech company working towards radically improving the well-being of everyone affected by cancer with a focus on mental health. And we are developing and have launched the app, which is a social app for people in treatment, after treatment, and their loved ones. On the app, our members are able to share their journeys, talk about their experiences, follow people and get in touch with others who know what it means to go through cancer. So in essence, it's a full-scale social app. But moreover, our our second purpose with the company is to bridge the gap between patients and cancer research. And we do so by allowing our members, only if they want to, to engage in sharing their insights, experiences, and other types of patient-reported data. And this data then gets shared with our partners from the cancer research and life science sectors. And as of late, we also launched a feature within the app which enables our members to find relevant clinical trials that they might be applicable for. Yeah, that was a lot about the sort of product. Who am I? I'm uh I'm a cancer patient myself. And, you know, I uh I was diagnosed with cancer almost exactly six years ago, on the 2nd of July 2015, and um with blood cancer. I've gone through 900 days of chemotherapy, uh, which is a long, long journey. But I made it out on the other side, and I have a lot to thank for the whole experience, which I'm happy to share more about you within this podcast. But I I guess I'm at thriver now or so hard.

SPEAKER_02: 3:40

Thank you so much for that intro. 900 days of treatment, is that pretty standard for people with the type of cancer you have?

SPEAKER_00: 3:48

Um, I don't know if it's standard. I was put, I was lucky to be put in a clinical trial. So leukemia with blood cancer is typically one of those sort of cancers that it's a pediatric type of cancer. So a lot of kids get diagnosed with leukemia. And kids are, as we all know, super strong. Their cells regenerate extremely fast. So to treat them, you need a lot of chemo in order to avoid relapse in during the treatments. And this trial was testing whether putting the same amount of dosages of chemo for everybody up towards 30. I was 28 when I was diagnosed. So they gave me the child dosages, which was super high and intense. But through that, I think they've managed to increase the survival rate from between 50, 55 percent up towards 65, 70 percent. So it's a huge increase in terms of uh five-year and 10-year survival. So I'm super happy that I was put on it, and it was certainly worth the the heavy price.

SPEAKER_02: 4:55

That's interesting because normally in medicine it's the other way around, right? Like adults have the higher dosage and then they lighten the load for kids accordingly due to body weight. So what you're saying is for children, because their cells regenerate at a more robust pace that they generally have a higher dose.

SPEAKER_00: 5:17

Yeah, exactly. You know, it's leukemia starts in the in the bone marrow, the production area of the body when it comes to new cells. So the bone marrow starts producing carcinogen cells. And yeah, the younger you are, the faster the pace.

SPEAKER_02: 5:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 5:33

So it's reversed.

SPEAKER_02: 5:35

Yeah. 28, so very young at the time. Take us back there. What was that like? How did you get diagnosed in the first place? What was happening?

SPEAKER_00: 5:47

I was so I'm Stockholm based now, but I was living in London at the time. And it was my fifth year in that city. I had first come there after a couple of years in business school to work in investment banking. I guess not so much because I knew what finess was about. Rather, it was where I went very much with the external opinion of what success was. You know, that was something that due to certain traumas from early childhood, you know, I had this pretty big hole in my chest, which has made it difficult for me to be my authentic self. And everybody has this to some degree, but in my case, it was quite influential. You know, I was always looking for external validation, and that came in the form of banking for my career choice. So I came down there and started working away. And a few years into that journey, I started feeling empty. And this is, of course, the problem with whenever you're trying to fill a hole, right? Because it's just addictions. Yeah. Being considered successful is an addiction. It's just an illusion. It makes you feel whole, but it's an illusion. Once that illusion sort of gets drawn back, that hole gets ever so slightly larger. So I decided to completely shift careers into working in film acting. My parents come from the creative arts field. My dad was an opera singer, and my mother used to work at theater in Stockholm. So I've always been raised in that creative environment, but I've never never really had that interest. But all of a sudden I thought I had this pattern for art. And I lunged myself into this new career of acting in London. And of course, what I did in reality was just replacing one addiction with another. Instead of being a glorious banker, I wanted to become a movie star in LA. I didn't see that back then, of course. But I throw myself into this new world. It's very energetic. There's a lot of casting, it's a lot of networking, and I quickly found myself at various nightly events and parties and these type of things. And with that came a lot of alcohol consumption. And of course, not long after came drugs and these things. So I was always just thought that I was on the path towards something new. I was made pretty quickly into something, but the ground beneath my feet, things were really moving because I was running on fumes, adrenaline, a lot of partying. I was running low on finances. And by the spring of 2015, things had really escalated for me. My friends became worried and started sort of asking me, you know, maybe you should stop or chill out a bit. Of course, I didn't see that. I just said, you know what? Come on, like I'm on, I'm skyrocketing here. And I had also picked up more and more of these sort of addictions. So I was counting calories, I was running 10 kilometers a day. You know, I was just picking everything up and I was crashing. And one day I felt like something was sent to me from somewhere else. Because I woke up just feeling super tired. And this was in uh early May 2015. And intuitively, I felt that I needed a break from this sort of London experience. And I intuitively felt that I needed to go back to Sweden to visit my parents over the summer. So I go there and I book a flights for a month later. And during this month, this tire that just kept growing into an exhaustion that started sweating all over my body and you know, aching. And on the day when I was gonna fly back to Stockholm, I um woke up with this enormous pain in my chest area, which made it hard for me to breathe. And this is where I get worried because now I feel like something is wrong with my body. But I made it over to uh Stockholm and and decided not to say anything because both my parents came out to the airport to meet me because I was I'm basically never home. So they were super excited, and so I chose not to say anything, and we went out for dinner. This pain just kept gnawing at me, and at some point I just uttered the words that should have uttered many, many years before, which is I can't breathe. I'm struggling to breathe. And we rushed to the hospital and I get scanned, and two days later I'm diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, which is an aggressive form of blood cancer. And I think everybody reacts differently. Uh, in my case, what happened was I felt this peaceful, almost harmonious feeling inside of me. It was like a voice said to me, like, you don't have to run anymore, you don't have to chase anymore, you can just sit back and relax. And I remember sort of almost welcoming that that news of my cancer diagnosis. Um of course, yeah, and I think we can both see that on a subconscious level, I had lost my will to live at that point, even though on a conscious level, there was such a disconnect within me. And, you know, I was rocked out of that peaceful moment and back into reality pretty shortly after when doctors tell me that you're looking at a 60 to 70% chance of surviving, gonna put you on trial. And it's gonna take you two and a half years, so 912 days of chemo. And, you know, by this point, I was no longer in that harmonious kind of. I think that was my authentic self that, you know, made it out into the the open for the first time in a long time. Because now I was back in this sort of more egoic mindset where I was identified with my career. So hearing the news of 900 days of chemotherapy was like dying because I knew that my career was over. Everything that I'd worked for was gone. And for the first time in my adult life, I felt powerless. I felt completely and utterly powerless. Of course, the ego hates losing power. Yeah. So instinctively, I felt, you know, I needed to be seen and heard. So I took to social media because that's the place where you get seen and hurt. And I wrote this post, a cry for help, where I explained the situation and I asked for the people who could help me find someone in a similar situation. What happened after this post would uh change my life forever. So literally, this post was shared 13,000 times over the course of 24 hours. Literally, what followed, you know, was the most beautiful thing I've ever experienced. So thousands and thousands of people from all over the world sent their love to me. Just personal stories started pouring in from people. Stories about love, about sacrifice, about bravery, uh, about loss. It felt as if I could touch upon the amount of energy that was being derived to me in that moment. It felt like, you know, the the air got thick for a while. I'll never forget that experience. I think what what people felt the most was because I wrote from my heart when I wrote it, you know, I wrote openly about my emotions and frustrations about feeling that my life was lost and these things. And I think that's resonated with a lot of people. Right. And and what I noticed in all of those messages, above all, was gratefulness. And basically, everybody started with saying something along the lines of thank you for sharing. I'm going through this, or I've gone through a cancer experience, and just so you know, this is really helping. And when I read those messages, it was like something within me opened. So I had not been in touch with my emotions for a long time. And it felt like my almost like my heart, you know, broke open and I received a lot of that love, and I started crying. So I started crying tears of joy, which was a whole new experience for me as well. For a long time, I just felt this love that people were sending me. And I think in in that moment, I received one of my life's missions, which was to share my journey openly about what it means to go through cancer and really document that journey. And that became the start of the war on cancer blog. So I named a blog, Fabian Bowling's War on Cancer, and that really became the start of it all.

SPEAKER_02: 14:24

You don't mind me asking, why did you choose that title?

SPEAKER_00: 14:29

Yeah, it's a good point. Like right now, I don't think of cancer as a war or anything like that, but that's the way I felt about it back then. So that's really where the name came from.

SPEAKER_02: 14:40

I think Sweden oftentimes for us in the United States and in the social science field is kind of like the holy grail. I won't go down the whole list there, but what is the culture like in Sweden or for the Swedes around talking about mental health?

SPEAKER_00: 15:00

So we uh between 100 and 200 years ago, most of the people in Sweden were farmers, were working hard. The climate and weather was tough. I mean, we ate dinner together, we had like a long dinner on Saturdays. So we never really grew into talking. And it's especially we like to keep it shallow in that sense. The general Swede is not so much in touch with their emotions, which means you don't talk about it often. It's better now as talking about mental health in general is becoming more or normal, but still stigmatized weirdly, I think. Yeah. Even amongst younger, like 20, 30, 40, you know, still there's still some stigma to it here in Sweden.

SPEAKER_02: 15:41

So was that hard to talk about your emotions with your parents?

SPEAKER_00: 15:44

Not with my parents in that. We were quite open and stuff happened actually between myself and my parents. I stayed with my mom's during the whole treatment period. Moving into your mother's again, you know, you're not supposed to do that in a way because it's like a regressive move. But and there was a lot of challenges to that. But there was also a lot of positive that came out of it. We were able to talk as adults to one another. I was approaching 30 and I had some experience, and I found it was one of the best, one of the best things about going through cancer, actually, was growing closer to both my parents in that sense, opening the up to them, understanding more about who they are, you know, the lives they've lived.

SPEAKER_02: 16:30

And I feel like I sort of sidetracked you on your story.

SPEAKER_00: 16:32

No, I uh I really appreciate your questions. It makes it a much more lively, like a more lively conversation. But um, yeah, this blog, you know, that became a savior for me from a mental health point of view, and it made me understand the power of uh the human connection. So why was it so good? Firstly, I found sharing therapeutic. It was a way for me to in real time process the emotional trauma that I was experiencing. Secondly, sharing helped me normalize the whole cancer situation. Basically, all my friends were reading that blog, I think, uh, in the beginning. A lot of you notice you're the usual, you know, the people disappear, the dinner invitations just dry up, don't they, once you get diagnosed. So and I addressed all this in a sort of a humoristic way, not in a blaming way, because I understand because I I believe a lot of the fear from cancer comes from the way cancer is being marketed. There's a lot of charity organizations that need donations in order to survive. Because there are many and there could be, you know, you have this kind of focus on the negative aspects more than the positive, which is also natural. And it's good because these organizations do good things with the money. However, it creates a negative stigma and climate, which is destructive for people going through cancer. But I was able to address this and say, you know, how come nobody invites me for a beer and more? And people love that. I was playing with them in that sense, and it may it my surrounding ease up a bit about the whole thing.

SPEAKER_02: 17:55

Yeah, it's a very kind of serendipitous way for you to have non-confrontational communication with people around you because they might have been afraid to ask, like, hey, Fabian, can you still drink alcohol while you're in treatment? Right. I mean, that's probably that's probably a question in their mind, but then they're probably afraid to come to you and ask you that question because they're like, is that gonna make him upset? So then they just end up not asking you and then not inviting you because they don't know how you're gonna feel when you show up at the party.

SPEAKER_00: 18:26

Exactly. And they love that. And a lot of them read and they thanked me for helping them, you know, understand how to behave or how they can be better supports. So that really was super helpful for my mental health. But lastly, I think it was this notion that my story was helping others that had the most profound effect on my mental health. This blog it peaked at around 200,000 readers. I can honestly say that I've never in my life experienced a bigger sense of purpose nor meaning than when I was doing this. And I've never felt happier. For me, I I felt like cancer had come to me and really almost saved me in that sense that I was heading down the wrong path in my life. So for me, cancer became something that I could look back upon with almost uh like a gratefulness. And I remember saying this in my mother, who of course did not feel the same way about it, because I was I think of it as a blessing almost. And she had a whole nother way of looking at it because she's still experiencing, I think, the the aftermath of going through something like that. So it's it's different. But that's what I felt. And it was in this euphoric state that something within me, like a vision formed. I thought to myself, the way I'm feeling is so different from most people that I meet. What if we can understand what it is that is going on in my mind and build something out of it that replicates these experiences? You know, what is it that makes me feel so good? If we understand that and productize it, we can really build something that can radically revolutionize mental health for people going through cancer. And in order to sort of understand it a bit better, we should look at mental health. Uh, because mental health is one of those words that get tossed around a lot. And it means different things for different people. But luckily, there's some more official descriptions as well. So, according to mental health off the call, mental health is broken down into emotional well-being, psychological well-being, and social well-being. I mean, let's start with social well-being. It's the easiest one to understand. It's connected to having a social context where you can be your authentic self. And I mean, for a cancer patient, it's easy to see that from what we just talked about, everybody around you pities you. You're not able to be your authentic self, and your social well-being is gonna drop. And psychological well-being is connected to having a sense of purpose and meaning in life. And in my case, my identity was connected to my career. So, and that was my meaning and purpose. So that really dropped for me. And then emotional well-being is tied to understanding your emotions and being able to express them. I think a lot of people, especially in the very beginning of going through cancer, experience is chaos where everything is gets thrown out, and a lot of patients experience PTSD and depression and also anxiety. All these things are emotional well-being. In order to increase each of these, I mean, it's easy to see that what I was doing when I was sharing my blog was applying different coping mechanisms to boost each and every one of those. So, the social, like I talked about, by sharing, I got the social support network that I needed, not just digitally, but also amongst my friends. Psychological well-being came from knowing that I was helping others because the easiest and best way to find meaning and purpose in life is by helping others.

SPEAKER_01: 22:11

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 22:11

And then emotional well-being came through the therapeutic aspect of sharing. So writing is super good for dealing with emotional well-being. So that is why I was I was applying coping mechanisms without understanding it.

SPEAKER_01: 22:27

Survival.

SPEAKER_00: 22:28

And thus, yeah, exactly. And thus, you know, I needed a partner to build this because I was so weak. And there's always this one friend who becomes more of a friend in situations like this. And that's uh my best friend since uh first day of high school, Sebastian. He was there for me from day one when I was diagnosed. We actually shared a flat together in London when I was diagnosed. And, you know, he kept calling every day. And in the beginning, he was like most others, you know, you talk, but it touched upon the awkwardness. But after a while, he understood that, you know, I just need to treat Fabian like Fabian and not like a victim. And we just started talking about, you know, whatever people talk about, parties and job work and life in general. And I I asked him, I have this idea to build something. I want to make other people feel the way I feel. And it was actually Sebastian who sort of conceptualized the first idea of plant cancer, sort of like a let's build a platform where we unite people and their stories. Thus we set off on building the app and and everything.

SPEAKER_02: 23:31

And before we get into more of the app and some of the coolest things that you guys are doing lately, I know you talked about the hardest part to work through was work.

SPEAKER_01: 23:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 23:41

And the idea of having to go through 900 days of chemo, and that meaning that you can't probably have a normal nine to five job like everybody else. So how did you work through that piece?

SPEAKER_00: 23:55

Yeah, it was difficult for me because even though the blogging and everything kept me super occupied, underneath it, I still felt like my life was sort of crushed and ruined. And I think I ran from it like internally for quite some time. And it worked like that for a few months until it started to sink in for me. That because at some point, you know, I guess the popularity as well as my engagement with the blog started to fade slightly. It was always the most intense in the beginning, and then after a while, it was just maintenance. And that's it's not so much more to write about in that sense, or that's what I felt. And that stillness reality sunk in for me that wow, what do I do now? Like what happens? And this was before we really had the time to kind of work out what born cancer would be. So I found myself falling into depression for the first time in my life. I really felt the real effects of depression where you just wake up and you you lose down on that will to live. Like you don't have the will to go up in the morning and tired all the time. And it was scary to feel like that. And I really, my way of dealing with it was I started exercising. It was a like a good first step in the right direction because I'd lost 40 pounds of looking like a skeleton, skin and bones. But I also made this weird decision that I rarely talk about. So I don't know why, I keep forgetting about it. But I moved from Stockholm back to London in the middle of my cancer treatment journey. So six months in, I, when the worst was over, um, but I lost all my weight, my hair was gone, and they I was super still sickly. I decide that I need to kind of pick up my life where I left it off and make the decision to move back to London. I go to my doctor and say, Can you transfer my hospital stake from Stockholm to London? They looked at me like I don't think they've ever seen someone do that before. Because they're like, Well, are you leaving now? I was like, Yeah, I'm moving. They're like, okay. And it's like, we have rehealthcare in the EU, so I can choose whichever hospital I want. Because nobody ever does that. So they took them three months to be able to just understand that they had to email the medical records to Bart's Hospital in London. And I go there, I have no money, I'm there for a couple of months before moving back to Sweden again because I realized that you know I can't be here. That's why I didn't never tell the story. So messy to talk about. So it's so complex, that London aspect. But I think that was just my way of running from the fact that I was depressed. I had to get out of depression. Yeah. So I came up with this idea to kind of reclaim my life instead of just phasing the depression.

SPEAKER_02: 26:42

Yeah. I don't know. I see all of that as a sign of survival, right? Like you're trying to you're trying to find something because back at home you were just stuck. I was you're stuck with treatment. Log is, you know, maybe phasing down a little bit. So you're trying to find something else.

SPEAKER_00: 26:59

Yeah. And also stuck in many ways. I was stuck living with my mothers, and I was sort of broached financially because I hadn't I had nothing. It was such a weird, weird situation.

SPEAKER_02: 27:12

Back to then what you were saying about the app. So then you're working with SEB.

SPEAKER_00: 27:16

Right. We started with War on Cancer as a blog portal. So we launched WarrenCancer.com and we uh we told everybody that we're trying to unite the world of stories and storytelling for cancer. And this blog or this blog portal, war on cancer.com, it grew to have storytellers from more than 20 countries covering more than 35 fourths of cancer. And a third of the people who wrote were not patients, they were loved ones or caregivers. Where we saw, of course, that the need is could be equally big for those on the side. And with this sort of, I guess, initial hype and success of this portal, we started to get invitations to come and speak at different healthcare conferences and menttech and health tech. And one of the first conferences we got invited to was to open the European MedTech Forum, which is the largest in Europe. And the thing is though, we didn't know what MedTech meant. So we had to, we had to Google it on the way down. Because we're not like Seb was also from the finance like industry. So we had no clue about healthcare and these things. And the naivety helped us because I was up on the stage and told a story and I said, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna really turn the tables around, we're gonna unite the whole world in one platform and we're gonna solve the mental health problem. Uh and nobody speaks like that in these types of conferences. So we got in touch with a lot of interesting organizations, one of them being Microsoft, who said, we love this thing. We want to help you out. They gave us a tech grant to build on their Azure technology. But I think the most important conversations were held together with the cancer research organizations. And I still remember like a super senior person at a life science company came up to us afterwards and said, This is great what you're doing. Do you understand the full potential of lung cancer? And we sort of a bit naively said, Yeah, we're gonna solve the mental health problem, you know, no more depression, these things. And he's like, Yeah, that's awesome. But you know, if you manage to unite patients on one app, you have a unique opportunity to lift their voices because their insights and experiences are super valuable and important. Everybody talks about it, but nobody knows how to collect it. So it's called patient-reported data, real-world evidence. If you have ever attended anything near a healthcare conference, the theme will be along the lines of patient centric care. So, how can we achieve a care that is based on the individual needs of the patient? If you would know the needs and experiences of everyone, you can sort of tailor the care and make everything so much more efficient. So that's where we saw you know, we can really build something here that. Is first and foremost and forever for the benefit of the people going through cancer. But make it as part of the experience that if they want to, engage in sharing their experiences and sharing their knowledge. And why would they then do that? Well, this is what then ties back into mental health because it's about psychological well-being. Knowing that you're helping others is going to improve your mental health. So according to research, 95% of patients want to share their experiences and data as long as they know that it's being used for good. We got to make sure that they understand whatever it is that they're donating or sharing or contributing data to, who is the partner we're working with and what's the intent, what's the purpose of the study. So we're working very transparently and we think of it as almost like consensual, very consensual data sharing in the sense that it's not up to us. We're not we're never just going to take data. It's always going to be up to the members. And um as of very recently, we uh together with Microsoft, we launched in the Warren Cancer app a um service or feature which enables our members to search and find clinical trials. And it's a smart algorithm which matches the over existing data that is on the member in the apps, just diagnosis, age, gender, and these things. And then lets the member answer further questions to kind of filter down the uh, I think right now it's about 14,000 clinical trials for cancer alone. Filter it down to maybe 10 or 20, and then bring those clinical trials to their doctors and say, you know, what about this? Because the sad part is that being part of a clinical trial is believed to be to give you the best option of surviving because it gives you access to the most latest and modern healthcare. Sadly, 60% of the clinical trials are non-performing sites. They fail because you can't meet recruitment criteria. And this is not because there are not enough patients, because there are 46 million patients right now in the world. It's not because they don't want to be on there because 10 million people die from cancer every year, but it's because there's no infrastructure that matches. So everything's analog.

SPEAKER_01: 32:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 32:25

Everything right now is sort of my doctor needs to be aware of all the research happening on the global level. And there's just not enough time. So a lot of things get missed, and a lot of patients get told you have six months left to live, whilst in reality there are clinical trials looking for that patient. And that's where we come in.

SPEAKER_02: 32:44

That's an incredible feature for kidney cancer now. There are maybe nine or ten different types of treatments that somebody can try. And so, in some ways, we had a lot of runway, but I remember, you know, because I was like, uh-oh, we're like halfway through the list. Gotta gotta look at what other possibilities. And then also there's always this desire, as you say, to try out the newest and latest, because you know, you kind of know what the outcome of the older types of treatment are, and some of them have harsher side effects. So I know I was particularly interested in immunotherapy because it felt like it could have very positive outcome for some patients and also the side effects would have been milder. But yeah, it was just such a maze. I mean, like you had to somehow find a repository online and being able to read through all the criteria yourself, which just felt impossible when you know you already had 10 million other things that you're trying to attend to. So this is amazing.

SPEAKER_00: 33:45

Well, thank you. And then it we're just in her defaces, but we've had already some six, seven hundred people using the service. Uh, we're collecting the initial feedback from them and learning how to learning how to navigate to make sure that we develop a better uh future. It's not like we are trying to circumvent the doctor uh right now, but rather we want the patient to be able to copile with a bit more and you know, help out. Come in and say, can we have a look at these together, for instance?

SPEAKER_02: 34:13

So these are worldwide trials.

SPEAKER_00: 34:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 34:16

Wow. That's really opens up the pool in the opportunities as well.

SPEAKER_00: 34:22

So we're using the source, the database we're using is clinical trials.gov, which they have 95% of all clinical trials in the world. It's one of those whole, wholesome, like full uh all-encompassing uh searches to do.

SPEAKER_02: 34:38

We touched on this earlier in terms of data privacy, which is kind of a dirty word. How do you make sure that people understand how the app is managing their data and that they feel comfortable and trust what you're doing?

SPEAKER_00: 34:54

Yeah. I mean, we we of course applied to everything GDBR, like all the different sort of data for privacy. Uh we want to take it further than that, though, because yes, you have to consent on things, but whoever actually leads them. So we want to, as much as possible, to involve our patients and our our members in really understanding why is it, for instance, that my diagnosis is necessary for me to know when matching to clinical trial. Some things might be obvious, but it's important also to mention here that we'll never, so we're never sharing any type of data with external parties just from using the app. It's only if you engage in a health study where you'll see who is the recipient. And also, if I look and search for the clinical trials using that feature, none of that data will ever reach the people who conducted the trials. It's up to me to apply them. You can use the app as much as you want. And the only thing we'll ever be using your data for is to improve the app experience, meaning we'll be able to match it with people with similar diagnosis, country, age, and gender, and these things, which it's quite natural for a social app to be able to function. But we take that super seriously and more than just sort of fulfilling the criteria, because by being really transparent, we think we can gain more trust.

SPEAKER_02: 36:15

Thank you. Any any last words you want to share with the listener before we wrap?

SPEAKER_00: 36:22

Yeah, I hope the story, because I know a lot of people who are listening are, you know, they have their experiences. And and really what I hope the story can do is give them some hope that going through cancer doesn't necessarily have to mean the end of your life. It can really mean the beginning of a new life for you. And grab that opportunity because you'll have a lot of time to reflect on things, you know, really think about where are you? Like what choices have you made? And why do you think you ended up where you are right now? Doesn't mean that you have to blame yourself for getting cancer, you know, but it's always can always be constructed to think along those lines. What was your lifestyle before? And are there things you can do to improve? Because you might actually end up then with this this concept called post-traumatic growth, which means that uh you'll end up in a higher, a better mental health situation than you were before because of the fact that you've gone through trauma. And that's something uh I I hope you feel is worth fighting for.

SPEAKER_02: 37:24

Thank you. And the War on Cancer app is available on iPhones because I got it. Uh is it also on Android?

SPEAKER_00: 37:33

Definitely. It's on Android and iPhone, and it's it's free to download, of course.

SPEAKER_02: 37:38

And uh where can listeners find you online if they want to connect with you?

SPEAKER_00: 37:43

I would say the War on Cancer app, but of course I'm on uh Instagram as well. And my username is Fabian Bolin. F-A-B-I-A-N-B-O-L-I-N. So yeah, Instagram or in the War on Cancer app.

SPEAKER_02: 37:59

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to share a part of your journey today. To your point, there's so much growth that can come out of the experience.

SPEAKER_00: 38:08

Thanks a lot for having me, Serena.

SPEAKER_02: 38:13

What's really important about Fabian's story is that oftentimes when you get a cancer diagnosis, it doesn't mean that whatever crisis you were already facing in your personal life just gets put on hold. As we heard, crises can have a way of amplifying each other and making the experience more complex and difficult to untangle. I was really impressed with how Fabian was able to pull apart what was helping him versus not in the middle of such an intense emotional roller coaster. It just shows how much work he has put into processing his own experiences and ultimately channeling the learnings towards building the War on Cancer platform to support other cancer people struggling with mental health. And that's a wrap for today. Please consider following the podcast if these stories are resonating with you. Also, let me know if there's a specific topic you would want to hear more about on the show. You can contact me at info at talkabout cancerpodcast.com or find me on most major social media platforms. Thank you for listening.