u/Square_Intention_794

It is Day 345 living with cancer, and fighting to live is tiring.

Earlier this week, I was offered a slot in a clinical trial.

I feel enormous gratitude, but getting to this point took more out of me than I realized.

There is the physical part: chemo two weeks on and one week off.

There is the aftermath, when your body simply stops working the way it is supposed to work.

Then there is the mental part, when you desperately want one ordinary day without thinking about your mortality.

Cancer gives you both a curse and a gift: a life shot clock that constantly reminds you that you are human.

The exhaustion comes from carrying all of those things at once while continually preparing for an unknown future.

Now comes a third medical center, a clinical trial, a new city, new oncology staff, unfamiliar language about cycles and treatment schedules, and a targeted therapy aimed directly at my cancer.

It feels a little like starting a new job and onboarding yourself from scratch, except the job is to stay alive.

Along this journey, people have told me about loved ones who were diagnosed around the same time I was diagnosed and who are no longer here.

I hear those stories and carry them… from Patrick Swayze to Steve Jobs to RGB to Randy Pausch to people recently diagnosed with cancer.

I simply refuse to concede to cancer.

I have not shared that I tend to walk into infusion centers and medical centers alone.

There is something important to me about making my own decisions, listening carefully to what my body is telling me, studying the signals I am receiving, and paying equal attention to the signals I am not receiving.

Because I sometimes wonder, if I concede an inch, will I eventually concede a foot?

And if I concede a foot, will I someday concede a mile?

So I keep moving.

Today my body hurts.

Southern California feels unreasonably hot in October at nearly 105 degrees.

Yet I drove 20 minutes for a cup of coffee that I plan to enjoy slowly for at least an hour.

On the days when I do not have Iris with me, I am alone, my mind can spin, but I reflect, calculate, worry, plan and proactively search for the next opening.

Cancer is no joke.

In less than a year, my body has moved from roughly 180 pounds to 125 pounds and back to around 165 pounds.

Some days I look in the mirror and genuinely wonder what exactly is happening inside me.

I am grateful, yet exhausted, but equally hopeful.

Psalm 23:4 says, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”

The important word for me today is “walk.”

The verse does not say we understand the valley.

It does not promise that the valley will be painless.

It simply reminds me that the valley is something we move through.

So that is what I am doing… walking.

Sometimes confidently, other times painfully with absolutely no idea where the path leads.

Thank you for the prayers, good vibes, thought, etc.

[…]

To read Day 1 living with cancer, please visit LinkedIn.com/in/angelcruzado

It is Day 317 living with pancreatic cancer, and on this rainy Sunday in Los Angeles, I have been thinking about access, privilege, and how parents can give children access they never had themselves.

Iris is in West Virginia today, and by age 11 she has experienced Arizona, Bermuda, California, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, Spain, Washington, and West Virginia.

By 11, I remember living in Massachusetts and visiting Puerto Rico, Florida, and New York.

Our childhoods have been very different.

Iris has explored soccer, competed in gymnastics, learned to surf, taken singing lessons, visited museums, and attended more than 50 theater productions.

She has spent time on beaches from Santa Monica, Laguna Beach, La Jolla, Venice, and Malibu to Massachusetts and Puerto Rico.

When I was her age, I went door to door with my Jehovah’s Witness parents, carrying Watchtower magazines and Bible tracts and sharing our religious message with strangers.

According to SchoolDigger, the elementary school I attended ranks 895th out of 906 in Massachusetts or bottom 1%.

Iris attends an elementary school ranked 40th out of 5,857 in California or top 1%.

As a kid, I do not remember family walks through parks, having a dog, staycations, museums, afternoons at the beach, or adults intentionally exposing me to careers, universities, communities, and possibilities.

College was not a recurring conversation in our home.

With Iris, I take the opposite approach.

We walk onto college campuses, peek inside lecture halls at places like Harvard, and act as though we belong to help her believe those institutions are within her universe of possibility.

Maybe that is one of the most consequential forms of privilege a parent can provide.

Not simply money, but access, exposure, and proximity to possibility.

The opportunity to see a theater production and imagine yourself onstage, walk through a university and imagine yourself studying there, visit another country and realize the world extends far beyond your neighborhood, or try enough things to discover what lights you up.

Cancer has made me think about this differently because I cannot control how many years I will have with Iris, but I can keep expanding the number of worlds she knows exist.

I cannot guarantee where she will go to college, what career she will pursue, where she will live, or who she will become.

What I can do is make her world bigger while I am here.

Perhaps privilege at its best is not raising a child who believes she is better than anyone else, but raising one who understands how fortunate she is, remains curious about people whose lives look different from hers, and never mistakes access for entitlement.

As parents, we cannot rewrite our own childhoods, but we can decide which limitations get inherited.

How are you intentionally giving your children access to experiences, people, places, and possibilities that you did not have growing up?

They can be connected, but they are not always the same.

For years, I had a specific dream: become the Chief Human Resources Officer of a publicly traded company.

That dream shaped many decisions.

Before HR, I carried a HR sales bag through New York City, covering territory between 14th and 24th Streets.

I studied for the GMAT, moved to Wisconsin for business school, interned in Palo Alto, and kept betting on a future I could not yet see.

At the time, I thought I was chasing the dream.

Looking back, I was discovering my talent.

My talent was never simply Human Resources or an executive title.

It was figuring things out when the answer was unclear.

I became comfortable inside early-stage companies where priorities constantly changed and someone needed to turn ambiguity into something useful.

I also became drawn to helping people through transitions, especially when those transitions were unexpected or forced upon them.

Cancer is the biggest forced transition of my life.

I did not choose stage iv pancreatic cancer, chemotherapy, scans, side effects, genomic testing, or clinical trials, but I can choose how I navigate them.

Cancer gives you a plan and then changes it.

A treatment works until it does not and a scan every 60 days changes the strategy.

One doctor sees one path while another sees something different.

Suddenly, I am asking the same question I have spent my career helping others answer:

What comes next?

Maybe I was preparing for that question much earlier.

I was among the first in my family to enter corporate America, graduate from college and graduate school, study overseas, and leave Massachusetts to build a life elsewhere.

Every transition required rebuilding or reinspiring something: relationships, routines, confidence, community, identity, or perspective.

Cancer has required the same.

I have rebuilt my relationship with my body, time, productivity, ambition, and success.

Some days, success means building Respiris.

Other days, success means eating enough, getting through chemotherapy, or having enough energy to be present with Iris.

My ‘dream’ was becoming a CHRO.

My ‘talent’ was helping people and organizations figure out what comes next.

That talent eventually led me to being a founder, entrepreneurship, career transitions, and Respiris.

Now the company I built to help people navigate unwanted career transitions is helping teach me how to navigate an unwanted life transition.

The questions remain remarkably similar:

What can I control?

What options exist?

Who should I talk to?

What am I missing?

How do I move forward when the original plan disappears?

I still believe in chasing enormous dreams.

Dreams give us direction, but Talent gives us purpose.

And sometimes life eventually reveals why we needed both.

I am still figuring out what comes next under the 14-fourteen.

-
To follow my daily journey through Day 312 living with cancer, please visit my LinkedIn.com/in/angelcruzado.

This morning, I made steak and eggs because apparently this is what aggressively “proteining up” looks like when my body is preparing for another round of chemotherapy.

Yesterday, though, Iris and I pushed through the exhaustion and went to REDCAT to experience a reading of LAUREN SÁNCHEZ, a new play by playwright and screenwriter Bernardo Cubría.

She was the only eleven-year-old in the theatre.

Iris has mentioned several times that she wants to become an actor, and I genuinely love watching her imagine herself performing on a stage or appearing on a screen.

But part of my responsibility as her Dad is expanding the frame around everything she believes might be possible.

She can become an actor while also becoming a screenwriter, director, producer, voiceover artist, playwright, creator, or even the entrepreneur who owns the company producing the work.

I want her to think more like Lin-Manuel Miranda, who did not simply wait for someone else to create the perfect role or opportunity for him.

He learned how to write, perform, compose, produce, collaborate, and ultimately create worlds where his different talents could exist together.

Cancer has taught me a strangely similar lesson about the danger of limiting the frame around your own possibilities.

When you are living with a disease like mine, you cannot assume that one medical center has every answer, that one oncologist has every perspective, or that one therapy will carry you through every stage of the disease.

You have to keep learning, asking questions, seeking additional expertise, understanding emerging treatments, and looking at the same problem from different angles because the context surrounding a decision can completely change what becomes possible.

That is also what I want Iris to understand about her own life.

I am not trying to choose her future for her, because her life belongs entirely to her and she deserves the freedom to discover what genuinely excites her.

I am trying to expose her to enough people, professions, experiences, and possibilities that she never accidentally makes her world smaller simply because nobody showed her how much larger it could become.

Too many of the limitations we eventually accept begin as assumptions we never thought to question.

Yesterday provided exactly the kind of context that can quietly change what an eleven-year-old imagines for herself.

We watched a playwright develop a new work while actors brought his words to life, and the experience revealed how many different creative careers can exist around a single story.

Perspective and context are everything, whether you are an eleven-year-old imagining your future, or a fifty-four-year-old Dad trying to stay alive long enough to watch that future unfold.

The most important thing for me is to continue to expand the frame around what both of us believe is possible for ourselves and anyone in transition.

It is Day 310 living with cancer, and some days I think about the man with leprosy in the Bible, not because our illnesses are the same, but because serious illness can make you feel separated from the people you most want to stay close to.

This Sunday, I keep thinking about Mark 1:40–42.

A man with leprosy approached Jesus asking to be healed, and Jesus responded by moving toward him and touching him.

Before the healing, there was connection, and that feels meaningful right now.

I know it is hard for the people closest to me to see me like this.

They have seen me lose weight, fight to gain it back, deal with neuropathy, pain, exhaustion, losing my hair, and a body that changes from week to week.

They have also had to adjust to a version of me with more boundaries, more urgency and a greater need to talk about deeply personal things.

Cancer makes conversations about death, purpose, being a Daddy, money, legacy and love feel less theoretical, and I know those conversations can scare the people who love me most.

It is also not easy when I ask for prayer, good vibes, GoFundMe, etc.

I am trying to fight as hard as I can to stay here while also making sure Iris is set up for success if life does not go according to my plan.

At the same time, I still have to keep the lights on, be a founder, parent and handle ordinary adulthood.

Sometimes that means washing dishes while my abdomen hurts, pulling my stool/desk chair into the kitchen so I can prop myself up and finish.

And I am not done creating.

As I head toward Day 365, I am preparing to audition for TEDx with an idea born from this journey: how patients can use AI to avoid getting lost inside a fragmented healthcare system.

Iris and I are starting a podcast to capture our conversations and our life together.

www.instagram.com/DaddyDaughterLifeList

I am also drafting a book and movie script about overcoming adversity, including the years when I fought not to become a “Disney Dad” and to remain a present father.

Serious illness can turn a human being into appointments, scans, medications, lab values, insurance approvals and medical terminology.

You can spend so much energy holding a fragmented system together that you have less of yourself left for the people you are fighting to stay here for.

That is what I want to help change.

I want patients to understand their medical story well enough to ask better questions, seek the right expertise and become stronger partners in their care… not so healthcare consumes more of their lives, but so it consumes less.

For me, that means more breakfasts with Iris, more school drop-offs, more conversations, more ordinary evenings and, yes, more dishes.

Maybe that is what Mark 1 is reminding me this Sunday.

When someone you love is suffering, you do not always need the perfect words.

Sometimes the most meaningful thing you can do is move toward them, stay close and see the person before the disease.

[…]

To read Day 1 to 310 living with cancer or to learn how I built my AI Oncologist on Day 7, please follow me on LinkedIn.com/in/angelcruzado

Today I’m sitting at Philz Coffee in Studio City while Iris’s mom and grandmother get their nails done nearby.

It is a pretty ordinary Saturday scene, except our family is changing in some extraordinary ways.

I have pancreatic cancer. Iris’s mom got married last year, about a month before I was diagnosed, and she is expecting a baby next month.

So between cancer, co-parenting, a new marriage, and a new sibling entering Iris’s life, we are all figuring out what this next version of family looks like.

I’m also exhausted.
Between treatments, I take Zarzio injections to stimulate my bone marrow and help produce more white blood cells. For me, that can mean a 24-hour fever followed by night sweats so intense I wake up completely drenched when it finally breaks.

And then life keeps moving.

Gymnastics registration. Iris’s passport. TroopHR. Transform. AFROTECH. My book. A family wedding. And Respiris.

I’m also vetting and onboarding more coaches as we continue supporting clients across the U.S., U.K., South Africa, and beyond.

Apparently cancer did not cancel adulthood. Or entrepreneurship.

Yesterday brought encouraging news: my DVT ultrasound was negative, and my recent CA 19-9 and CA-125 results were encouraging too.

Now I’m looking toward scans over the next month to understand what treatment is actually doing.

I know better than to predict what they will show.
But having things to build, plan, write, attend, and look forward to keeps pulling me forward.

Parenting. Planning. Building. Rebuilding my body. Adjusting.

And fighting.

Or, as I say, pushing through tomorrow every day.
Thank you to everyone helping Iris and me keep moving forward.

Day 309. Exhausted, yes. But making plans, showing up, and still here. ❤️

Twenty-three infusions in, I have almost no hair left anywhere on my body.

The funny part is, I started shaving my head when I was about 28. A buddy noticed my receding hairline, handed me a razor and simply said:

“It’s time.”

I have been shaving my head ever since.

Now I might shave once a month because there is barely anything left to shave.

Cancer has officially made grooming easier.

Treatment-wise, I started with NALIRIFOX. When the cancer began growing again, we moved to gemcitabine + Abraxane, which is where I am today.

There are additional treatment options ahead, and I am still working hard to secure my third line of defense before I need it.

For now, things are fairly okay.

The hardest part is not actually the hair, the chemo, or even the uncertainty.

It is being a Dad with cancer.

It is getting the medical directive, trust and will organized.

It is getting a podcast going with Iris so we can capture our stories and conversations together.

It is settling into our new home, helping her adjust to a new school and neighborhood, and figuring out our new rhythm.

And it is making sure her future is protected while I fight like hell to be here for it.

That is why I am so grateful for every prayer, good vibe, messages, etc.

That support gives me peace of mind and helps me continue investing in Iris’s future through her 529, UTMA and minor Roth IRA.

I cannot control everything cancer does.

But I can keep fighting, keep planning and keep being her dad.

The eyebrows may be leaving.

I’m not.

Thank you for continuing to take care of us. ❤️

-

To follow Day 1 to 308 my living with cancer, please visit LinkedIn.com/in/AngelCruzado

I sat at Parent Night at Iris’s school and felt enormous gratitude that both her mom and I could be there, showing up for the same not-so-tiny human.

Years ago, while navigating family court in Washington State, I came dangerously close to becoming what people call a “Disney Dad”—a father who gets the occasional weekend or fun outing, but loses much of the ordinary time when parenting actually happens.

I lost significant time with my daughter between the ages of three and six.

I could spend the rest of my life angry about those years.
I have chosen not to.

That does not mean they did not matter. It means recognizing that permanent anger would eventually take something else from me: the ability to appreciate the relationship I fought so hard to build.

Strangely, I think that experience prepared me for cancer.

People ask how I keep moving through 23 infusions, metastatic pancreatic cancer, clinical-trial decisions, parenting, uncertainty, and building a company.

Some of those muscles were built long before cancer arrived.

I learned how to live with enormous conflict without letting it consume me. I learned how to advocate fiercely while still moving forward.

Above all, I learned that gratitude is not surrender. Gratitude is how you reclaim your life.

Last night, gratitude looked like two parents sitting at their kid’s school.

It looked like knowing that despite everything, my relationship with Iris is going the distance because I kept showing up, investing the time, and being her dad.

I know I have made mistakes, but I also know I have lived with purpose.

Now you are watching me learn the science, follow the biomarkers, study the trials, advocate for myself, protect my strength, use AI relentlessly, build community, and create as many paths forward as possible.

But last night, I was simply grateful to sit near Iris’s mom and watch our not-so-tiny human begin another chapter.

For something so ordinary, it felt pretty extraordinary.

To read Day 1 to 305 living with cancer, please visit my LinkedIn.com/in/AngelCruzado

It is Day 306 living with cancer, and I am entering today with more information, more perspective, and more determination than I had when this journey began.

There is a lot of energy in the pancreatic cancer community today because daraxonrasib has created renewed attention around RAS-targeted treatment in pancreatic cancer, and for people living with this disease, every meaningful scientific advance can translate into something extraordinarily valuable: more time, more options, and another reason to keep pushing forward.

As for where I am today, my bloodwork continues to show a mixed but encouraging picture, because my CA 19-9 remains very low at 5.7, my CA-125 has come back down to 72.7 after a recent increase, my CEA remains elevated at 12.6 and deserves continued attention, and my alkaline phosphatase has fallen dramatically from a peak of 876 in late 2025 to 282 today.

My liver and kidney function remain preserved, my bilirubin, AST, ALT, and LDH are all in reassuring ranges, my white blood cells, neutrophils, and platelets remain strong enough to support continued treatment, and I am now paying closer attention to anemia, nutrition, muscle, strength, and overall physical reserve because staying treatment-ready matters just as much as following tumor markers.

I am encouraged by the progress that I can see, but I am also careful not to confuse favorable bloodwork with certainty, because imaging, clinical judgment, and the biology of the disease still determine what comes next.

That is why I remain intensely focused on the RMC-5127 clinical trial, and at this point I need Revolution Medicines and Massachusetts General Hospital to seriously consider me for enrollment if my clinical profile fits what they are looking for.

I am not asking for special treatment, but I am absolutely asking to be evaluated aggressively, thoughtfully, and without unnecessary delay, because when you are living with metastatic pancreatic cancer, timing matters and optionality matters.

And, if we are being practical, I also need a legitimate excuse to get to Boston, because apparently “I would like better clam chowder and colder weather” is not strong enough clinical justification.

I am grateful for every breakthrough that moves from the laboratory into real patients’ lives, and at the same time I remain focused on the next door that could open for me personally, because living with cancer has taught me that progress can be celebrated without losing urgency.

My job today is to stay strong enough, informed enough, and ready enough to take advantage of the best opportunity when it appears, while continuing to be present for my daughter, continuing to build, and continuing to live as fully as possible.

Tonight is Back to School Night at her new elementary school.

Day 306 is another data point, another decision point, and another day that science, artificial intelligence, discipline, family, and hope continue to matter.

And for the past few days, I have had pain in both thighs that feels like I pulled both hamstrings, which is confusing because I do not remember being drafted by the Dodgers, stealing second base, or doing anything remotely athletic enough to justify this level of soreness.

Yesterday, I went to Dodger Stadium with my daughter Iris, my best friend Dean, and his daughter and son to watch the Pirates play the Dodgers.

Dean had flown across the country with part of his family, and Iris joined us too.

Our daughters have known each other since they were born.

Over the years, they have spent time together in Berkeley, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, across different homes, venues, festivals, and sleepovers.

They have grown up with distance between them, but also with a friendship that keeps finding ways to close the gap.

For one afternoon the distance between them disappeared, and for a few hours, life felt beautifully normal.

I walked about 5,500 steps on Friday and Saturday, compared with roughly 2,000 steps per day earlier in the week.

Before cancer, I probably would have blamed the stairs, the parking lot, the stadium, my shoes, my age, or all of the above.

Now, even a familiar ache gets promoted to a board meeting.

I asked Dr. Sapo Concho, my AI oncologist, what might be going on, and he mentioned DVT as something to rule out.

My first response was honest: “What is that?”

DVT stands for deep vein thrombosis, which is a blood clot that forms in a deep vein, often in the leg.

I thought I was asking about soreness.

Cancer said, “Actually, let’s turn this into a medical vocabulary lesson.”

So now I am tracking what I feel and asking my care team whether a bilateral lower-extremity Doppler ultrasound makes sense to rule out DVT.

This is literally the strange balance of living with cancer.

You go to a baseball game with your kid and your best friend.

You laugh, eat, cheer and you remember that you are svery much alive.

Then you wake up the next day using your AI Oncologist to understand whether your thighs are being dramatic or medically significant.

Yesterday gave me sunshine, baseball, friendship, our daughters hanging out, and the rare feeling of normal life returning for a few hours.

Today my body is asking me to stay vigilant, ask better questions, and listen carefully to my body.

Joy and vigilance can co-exist at the same time.

On this Sunday I am grateful for you being part of this LinkedIn community, my family and friends beside me, my ability to listen to what my body is sharing with me, and am deeply committed to choosing the beautiful life unfolding in front of me.

I am living the dream… with cancer.

[...]

I write primarily on LinkedIn, where I’ve been documenting life with Stage IV pancreatic cancer one day at a time alongside the realities of being a Dad, Founder, and Good Human trying to build a future while confronting my mortality.

I’ve also been incredibly supported by people following this journey through prayers, good vibes, encouragement, introductions, and contributions to my GoFundMe.

That support has helped me feel less alone while navigating treatment, family, work, and the uncertainty of what comes next

Some days bring fatigue, pain, neuropathy, and the constant calculation of how close I need to remain to a bathroom.

Cancer can turn ordinary decisions into negotiations between what my body wants and what my mind still wants to experience.

Tonight, our neighbors invited us to the local high school football game because their kids were playing in the band.
Part of me could have stayed home, but we decided that participating in normal life was worth the effort.

The game cost $20 for one adult and one child, which made me laugh because I remember adults paying about $2 and children about $1 when I was growing up.

Cancer can consume you physically, but it can also shrink the way you think about what remains possible.

It can encourage you to stay home, avoid travel, stop building, reduce your plans, and organize your life around the disease.

I refuse to give cancer that much psychological territory.
I refuse to allow pancreatic cancer to become the central organizing principle of my identity.

I see myself as a creative and a founder actively building while living with cancer.

I have no idea whether mindset can extend my life by 20 percent, 80 percent, or any measurable percentage at all, because treatment, biology, science, and some luck will ultimately influence how much time I receive.

My three treatment goals remain simple:

1. Continue gem/Abraxane as my active bridge therapy while maintaining my strength and trial eligibility.

2. Prioritize RMC-5127 because my cancer carries KRAS G12V, and this G12V-specific investigational therapy is the path I am trying to access.

3. Keep RMC-6236 / Daraxonrasib EAP ready as a broader RAS-directed expanded-access option, while recognizing that it is not the same therapy as RMC-5127.

Having a 14 month / 14 year strategy matters psychologically because I am not simply waiting for cancer to make the next move.

If believing in a future keeps me building, parenting, traveling, connecting, laughing, pursuing treatment, and showing up for another football game, I will take every psychological edge available to me.

Maybe Yoda understood something when he said, “Do or do not. There is no try.”

That idea resonates differently when your life suddenly carries a visible clock.

By the end of each day, I look forward to resting because my body reminds me that treatment has consequences.

Today, I also put pictures on the walls and continued turning this apartment into something that finally feels like home.

After months of moving, treatment, and uncertainty, I am beginning to feel settled here in La Cañada Flintridge.

Sometimes fighting for your life means pursuing the next treatment opportunity, while other times it means putting pictures on the wall, taking your kid to a football game (and re-living high school 🤦🏽‍♂️), and continuing to build a future that cancer has not earned the right to take away.

[...]

I have written primarily on LinkedIn “Day Living with Cancer”, where I’ve been documenting my life with Stage IV pancreatic cancer one day at a time alongside the realities of being a Dad, Founder, and Good Human trying to build a future while confronting my mortality.

I’ve also been incredibly supported by people following this journey through prayers, good vibes, encouragement, introductions, and contributions to my GoFundMe.

That support has helped me feel less alone while navigating treatment, family, work, and the uncertainty of what comes next.

I think this is what happens when you put something as consequential as your life onto the internet and ask people for help on LinkedIn, Reddit, Substack and GoFundMe.

Some people skim the post and send encouragement.

Some read every single word.

Others double-click, triple-click, research the science, reach into their networks, make introductions, and try to figure out whether there is one more door that can be opened.

The range of responses has been enormous, and I am grateful for all of it.

Every introduction matters and data point matters.

Every person who says, “Let me see who I know,” matters.

I also know that some of you have lost parents, siblings, partners, and friends to pancreatic cancer, and following my journey may bring you back to some very difficult days.

I hope it also reminds you of how hard they fought for more time with you, to be at another birthday, another dinner, another ordinary Tuesday.

I am, perhaps, reflecting the mirror and do hope you remember that you carry a piece of them with you.

How they loved you, how they fought to be here with you, what they taught you, and the parts of them that now live through you.

Stage IV pancreatic cancer does not give you the luxury of being casual about time.

The five-year survival numbers are brutal… 12%.

Even when a new treatment meaningfully extends survival, I still find myself asking the question nobody really wants to ask:

Twice as long as what?

Fifteen months? Twenty months? Thirty months?

Those numbers are incredibly difficult to accept when you are the person doing the math.

So I refuse to treat a median as an expiration date.

At one point during this journey, I weighed 125 pounds.

Today, I am around 150 pounds.

My energy is mixed with some days better than others.

I am punching through the fatigue and trying to push things forward because cancer is happening, but so is the rest of my life.

My home is almost finally in order.

It’s Friday.

Next week, I am excited to post our marketplace opportunity for job-search coaches at Respiris.

I am excited to start reaching out one-on-one to CHROs and asking how we can support employees navigating career transitions.

And I am having conversations that most founders eventually need to have, except mine carry a little more urgency:

How do we scale Respiris with me in it, and how do we build it so it can thrive without me?

That is a difficult sentence to write.

But this is what it means for me to live 14 months and 14 years at the same time.

Build for tomorrow and fight like hell for many more tomorrows.

I remain deeply grateful for today.

So thank you for the introductions, the research, the prayers, the good vibes, the GoFundMe support, and every person who has decided that helping me find one more option is worth a few minutes of their day.

I am reading it, following up on each lead.

We‘ve got this.

Aqui seguimos!

15,000 people follow this journey on LinkedIn.

I have had 22 infusions.

Today, I need this community to help me get one conversation about RMC-5127.

My name is Angel Cruzado and 54 years old.

I am a Dad, Founder, Afro-Latino, and I have stage iv pancreatic adenocarcinoma metastatic to my liver.

And my cancer carries KRAS G12V.

That may be the most important sentence in this post.

RMC-5127 is Revolution Medicines’ investigational RAS(ON) G12V-selective inhibitor for advanced cancers like mine.

So here is my biology…

I don’t care if it is public as it is my life and death at stake.

My Tempus xF liquid biopsy confirmed KRAS p.G12V / c.35G>T.

ctDNA tumor fraction: 0.3%. bTMB: 0.0 m/MB.

MSI-high: not detected.

I received NALIRIFOX from November 12, 2025 through May 11, 2026, until progression, then moved to gemcitabine + nab-paclitaxel, my current treatment.

My ECOG performance status remains 0.

I work, travel, run my company, raising my 11-year-old daughter and planning a future while living with a cancer that keeps reminding me my future is not guaranteed.

My July MRI showed a pancreatic tumor of approximately 3.4 cm, bilobar liver metastases with mixed response, and an enlarging gastrohepatic lymph node.

I also have recent metastatic tissue; five liver-biopsy cores obtained in May that may be available for testing.

My August 12 labs:

Bilirubin: 0.2
Creatinine: 0.81
Albumin: 3.6
ALT: 23
AST: 32
ANC: 4.41
Platelets: 260
Hemoglobin: 10.1

I have a metallic biliary stent with no current obstruction, no anticoagulation, and only mild neuropathy in my big toes.

I know none of this guarantees eligibility.

I am asking for the opportunity to be screened.

I am also Afro-Latino.

Latino patients remain underrepresented in cancer trials and genomic research.

Now, narrow that population to metastatic pancreatic cancer.

Then, narrow it again to KRAS G12V.

There are not many people standing at this exact intersection of disease, mutation, background, physical fitness and willingness to participate.

I am here.

The challenge is geography.

I live in Los Angeles and do not currently see a California site.

The locations I keep finding include Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland and Texas.

But this community has already helped remove that barrier.

My GoFundMe has given me the ability to travel for treatment.

Boston? I’ll go.

Connecticut, Maryland or Texas? Put me on the plane.

For most people, RMC-5127 is a clinical trial.

For me, it could represent time.

Time to be a Dad, build Respiris, time to travel, time to write, and time to make memories with Iris.

So on Day 300, I am using everything I have, including 15,000 people on LinkedIn, to knock on the door.

If you work at Revolution Medicines, know someone there, or know an investigator working on RMC-5127-001 / NCT07349537…

Please help me get screened and help extend my life.

When I was diagnosed, I started building three communities around me: an emotional home team, a logistics home team, and an internet home team.

I thought that if I surrounded myself with enough good people, I could delegate some of the weight of cancer.

It turns out some things cannot be outsourced.

My emotional home team has been the hardest to navigate.

People I thought I could rely on sometimes began making assumptions about what caretaking should look like without asking what I needed.

That has forced me to establish boundaries and reconsider my expectations.

Deep empathy matters to me it is a company value.

So does talking honestly about family history, relationships, hurt, and the things that shaped us.

I cannot simply declare that “the past is the past” when it continues to influence the present.

Healing requires conversation, understanding, accountability, and grace.

My logistics home team exists, but everyone has competing priorities.

I went to Cabo thinking I would finally finish my will, medical directive, trustee decisions, and other pieces of getting my affairs in order.

Instead, I relaxed, read, and spent time learning how Patrick Swayze navigated pancreatic cancer.

Maybe I needed that more.

My internet home team has been incredible.

Tomorrow, Lourdes and Alena, sponsored by GoFundMe funds from the Internet home team, are coming over to continue helping me settle into my apartment.

When I first brought people in to unpack boxes and put things away, I realized something strange: my home didn’t feel like my home.

Other people knew where things were better than I did.

I would walk into my kitchen and not know where something had been placed.

The space functioned, but it felt like someone else’s interpretation of my life.

That realization changed something for me.

I spend so much time thinking about Respiris, growth, customers, hiring, and everything I still want to accomplish.

But before I go gung-ho building the next version of the company, I need to get my own house in order literally and figuratively.

Proverbs 24:27 says, “Put your outdoor work in order and get your fields ready; after that, build your house.”

There is wisdom in sequence.

My goal is to keep this apartment until Iris goes to college or until we someday buy a home here in La Cañada Flintridge.

Iris is loving her new school, having the master bedroom as her own little suite, and discovering our new community.

We are also figuring out what our next “Love Life List” will look like together.

For now, Dad’s bedroom has temporarily become the clutter room.

And I am okay with that.

Because I am learning that getting my life in order is not a distraction from living.

It is part of living.

Thank you to everyone who has supported us.

I building Respiris, fighting cancer, but first, I need to make sure I am building home for me, Iris, friends and family.

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My name is Angel Cruzado. I write about living with pancreatic cancer and the intersection of being a founder, a dad, confronting mortality, and choosing to seize the day while I still can.

My cancer story begins with Day 1 on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/angelcruzado

For most of my life, caretaking meant showing up for someone else. I solved problems, carried responsibility, supported teams, protected family, and found another gear when everyone else was running out of energy.

Cancer has forced me to confront a harder version of that responsibility because now the person I need to take care of is… me.

After twenty-two chemotherapy infusions, my body cannot always keep pace with my ambition.

I have had to look at myself in the mirror and acknowledge something painful as a Founder:

“My cancer is slowing my company down.”

There are days when chemo wins the calendar, recovery takes priority over revenue, and appointments, blood counts, neuropathy, scans, and treatment decisions consume energy I would otherwise pour into the company.

That frustrates me because I can see so clearly what I want Respiris to become.

I am not interested in building another outplacement company that collects money, outsources the resume build, gives impacted employees a login, checks the box, and moves on.

I am building a better mousetrap for outplacement, one that asks a much more important question:

Did we actually reinspire the person whose life just changed?

Did they feel seen?

Did they regain confidence?

Did they develop a strategy, find community, and build momentum toward whatever comes next?

Is their swagger visible to me and others?

Respiris will sit in the middle of the HR ecosystem, much like communities and platforms such as Transform, Sequoia, and Rippling connect different parts of the people function.

For us, that connective tissue is career transition: companies, HR leaders, coaches, candidates, AI, community, and the resources that help someone move from disruption toward possibility.

That mission also gives me another reason to fight this cancer with fierceness.

I am not fighting simply because I want more time.

I know what I want to do with that time.

I want to be here to raise Iris.

I want to help thousands of people navigate career transitions with greater dignity and possibility.

I want to write my book about adversity, fatherhood, cancer, leadership, and reinvention.

I want to write the movie script about my experience navigating Washington State’s family-court system, how I believe Dad can be minimized within it, and how I fought through that experience rather than allowing it to define me.

There are sstories I want to tell, people I want to help, and a little girl I want to watch become a woman.

So taking care of myself has become part of taking care of Respiris.

I need to protect my energy, build systems, transfer relationships, empower other people to lead, and make sure the company does not have to move at the speed of my cancer.

I want Respiris to grow aggressively, but I want that growth to have intention, purpose, resilience, and a mission that can survive beyond its Founder.

It is Day 294 living with cancer and my body feels like it got hit by a Mack truck after months of asking it to absorb chemo, recover, and prepare itself to fight again.

There is a strange duality because I can spend one day working, thinking, laughing, being a Dad, building Respiris, and almost forgetting what is happening inside my body, while the following day reminds me exactly how demanding this fight has become.

I started with NALIRIFOX, eventually transitioned to Gemcitabine and Abraxane, and every treatment represents an attempt to control the disease while preserving enough strength for whatever upside comes next.

Right now, chemo has suppressed my white blood cells, so I am using Zarxio to stimulate their recovery.

That next line of therapy matters because my cancer carries a KRAS G12V mutation, which gives my oncology team another biological characteristic that we may be able to target rather than relying exclusively on conventional chemo.

My team at City of Hope is now working toward an Expanded Access Program (EAP) for daraxonrasib, a RAS-targeting therapy that could represent a fundamentally different way of attacking the molecular machinery helping drive my cancer.

I cannot predict whether daraxonrasib will work for me, how deeply I might respond, or how long any benefit might last.

I must know that living with metastatic cancer has taught me to respect that uncertainty.

In my control is how aggressively I prepare myself for the next opportunity.

I can understand my molecular profile, follow emerging research, seek opinions from physicians working at the frontier, monitor what my disease is doing, and keep asking questions when the answers could influence my next treatment decision.

I can also recognize that physical recovery represents part of the strategy because the strongest treatment option in the world matters considerably less if my body cannot tolerate it.

That means today requires me to accept that resting, eating, hydrating, rebuilding blood counts, and recovering from chemotherapy are not interruptions to the fight because they are necessary components of continuing it.

Throughout these 294 days, I have learned that hope by itself is not a strategy, but a thoughtful strategy can create legitimate reasons to hope.

While my body may feel like it encountered a Mack truck today, this difficult day does not determine what happens tomorrow.

Zarxio will help my blood counts recover, my medical team will continue preparing the next therapeutic option, and I will keep preparing myself physically and mentally for whatever the next chapter requires.

After 294 days of living with cancer, I understand more clearly than ever that survival sometimes means attacking and sometimes means recovering, while both actions ultimately serve the same objective.

My third line of defense is being prepared, and I intend to arrive ready for it.

Carpe diem.

It is my Day 290 living with cancer, and I apparently speak a new language: Pancreatic Cancer.

I recently spent a few days in Cabo, where I read Lisa Niemi Swayze’s Worth Fighting For, her account of Patrick Swayze’s life with pancreatic cancer.

As I read, I kept comparing parts of his experience with my own and thinking about how much I have learned since the day I was diagnosed.

Nearly 300 days ago, I did not know most of this vocabulary.

Bilirubin. ERCP. Eovist. Metal stent. CA 19-9. CEA. Tissue biopsy. Liquid biopsy. Creon. NALIRIFOX. Gem/Abraxane. Neuropathy. Granix. Hospice.

Then there are the words nobody needs an oncologist to explain, but cancer somehow changes anyway.

Time. Work. Money. Energy. Friendship. Parenting. Autonomy. Fear. Love. Legacy. Living. Dying.

I realized in Cabo that I have spent nearly 300 days building an education I never enrolled in.

So I wrote it down.

My latest article is an attempt to capture the language, lessons and lived experience I have accumulated while navigating Stage IV pancreatic cancer, not as a medical textbook or advice, but as one patient’s evolving playbook.

Some of it is clinical. Some of it is practical. Some of it is deeply personal.

My hope is that someone newly diagnosed, a caregiver sitting beside them, or simply a friend trying to understand what cancer does to a human life might find something useful in what I have learned.

I never wanted to become fluent in pancreatic cancer.

But now that I have learned some of the language, I might as well leave my notes on the table for the person who has to learn it next.

Cancer has a medical lifecycle, but a human life is bigger than one.

Here is what nearly 300 days have taught me.

I’m on Day 234 of living with Stage IV pancreatic cancer.

When I was diagnosed, I quickly discovered that cancer patients often spend hours trying to understand scans, pathology reports, lab work, treatment options, side effects, insurance issues, and clinical trials.

The stakes are high. The decisions are complicated. The clock never seems to stop ticking.

As a founder, I turned to something familiar: technology.

Using ChatGPT and my complete medical record, I built an AI oncologist to help me become a better-informed patient.

It doesn’t replace my doctors. It doesn’t prescribe treatment. It doesn’t make medical decisions.

What it does is help me ask better questions.

Over the past nine months, it has helped me identify the need for pancreatic enzymes (Creon), advocate for a second liver biopsy when important questions remained unanswered, monitor trends in my lab work, discuss the use of Granix to support my white blood cell count, add CA-125 as a tumor marker after CA 19-9 proved to be an unreliable indicator of disease progression for me, and better understand treatment options, including why Nalirifox might be preferable to FOLFIRINOX in my specific situation because of its toxicity profile.

Most importantly, it has helped me organize thousands of pages of medical records into something I can actually understand.

The AI has never been right because it is artificial intelligence.

It has been valuable because it helps me prepare for conversations with the physicians who are experts.

That preparation has given me more confidence in discussions with my oncology teams at City of Hope and Memorial Sloan Kettering.

I have also documented this entire journey publicly.

Every day I write… today is Day 234.

Some days I write about treatment. Some days I write about fear. Some days I write about being a dad to my 11-year-old daughter, Iris, while living with a disease where statistics can feel overwhelming.

The writing has become a record of what it actually looks like to navigate cancer one day at a time.

If you’re curious about how I built and use my AI oncologist, start with Day 7.

If you’re a patient, caregiver, physician, researcher, or simply interested in the future of AI in healthcare, I’d love to hear your perspective.

You can follow the journey here:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/angelcruzado

One day at a time.