In 2011, Amit Gupta was told he would die if he didn’t start chemo right away.
“People always say it's courageous that you fought this thing,” he says, “but in reality you don't really have a choice. If you’re given a diagnosis like this, you either die, or you try not to die. And I didn’t want to die, so I did whatever I could not to.”
His battle with leukemia was the hardest thing he'd ever gone through in his life, but from it, and from the support he received from friends and family, he developed a new outlook on how he wanted to shape his future.
“When I found out about my diagnosis, I was living a very charmed life,” he says. “I was working very hard but on something I loved, and I loved everyday of it. And I had lots of great friends and good relationships. I was just in a really good place. So I took a very big fall, it felt like. I went from having a lot of freedom, and a lot of play, and a lot of creativity, to being locked in a hospital room where I was hooked up to machines and someone came in to check on me every 30 minutes, night and day. I was just a miserable wreck, getting sicker by the day.”
Amit needed a stem cell transplant to survive, but the doctors told him there was no matching donor in the database.They even discouraged him from trying to establish drives to find a matching donor since the odds were 1 in 20,000.
“A lot of my drive came from my friends,” says Gupta, “who when they found out about this decided to hold drives anyway and started to hold them in New York and San Francisco and all over the country. The hospital room became sort of this campaign headquarters where we’d have a conference call every day, we had whiteboards up of different college campuses where we were working with student groups. We went on CNN. My friend Seth Godin went on NPR. Celebrities like Aziz Ansari and Chris Pratt did ads on YouTube. All of these things were arranged by friends who were banding together to do this, and of course all I could do in the hospital room was help to coordinate and do whatever I could but it really became a whole campaign. And eventually we did find a donor, the transplant happened, and that’s why I’m alive today."
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Amit Gupta is a serial entrepreneur, who at 19 started his first company, Daily Jolt, and then went on to found Photojojo, a brand devoted to the intersection of photography and fun. He also created Jelly, a casual co-working event that brings together tech workers to work from a fun, creative, collaborative environment. But the true turning point in his life came at 32, when he was diagnosed with leukemia and given only a few weeks to live.
To hear Amit Gupta’s story of survival against all odds, including his discovery of a true love and his 31 marriage proposals to her, listen to episode three of "Design The Life You Love."
"Design The Life You Love" is a podcast series hosted by renowned designer Ayse Birsel that explores the idea and practice of designing your life. Subscribe on RadioPublic, iTunes, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts.
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