Everything seemed to be going smoothly. I was thriving in my role, learning and growing every day, and I felt proud of the work I was doing. Outside of work, things were falling into place too. I was in a steady relationship with my then-girlfriend, who was incredibly supportive and understanding about the demands of my job. She knew the nature of my work meant unpredictable hours and last-minute assignments, but she never once complained. Instead, she stood by me patiently, always reminding me why I started and encouraging me when things got tough.

Despite the long hours and time apart, we made things work. I’d make the most of whatever time we had together, even if it meant grabbing a quick dinner or just catching up over the phone after a long shift. Her support gave me the balance I needed—between the intensity of the job and the comfort of having someone who truly understood and believed in me.

I knew she was the one I wanted to build a life with. So during a trip to Korea, I planned a surprise proposal at Namsan Tower in Seoul. I chose that spot not just for its romantic view, but because it felt symbolic—looking out over a city full of life, ready to start a new chapter together. As we stood beneath the love locks and city lights, I got down on one knee and asked her to marry me. It was a simple moment, but one filled with emotion, and I’ll never forget the look on her face when she said yes.

Little did I know that life had more planned for me.

It started with a swollen face that wouldn’t go away. For a couple of weeks, I brushed it off, thinking it was nothing serious. It was the 7th lunar month, after all—I assumed it was just some allergic reaction from all the incense burning in the air. I was still able to work, so I didn’t think too much into it.

But then came the chest pains—sharp, sudden, and always in the middle of the night. At first, I told myself it was just stress or poor sleep. It wasn’t until I was training for my 2.4km run and checked my heart rate that I knew something wasn’t right. My watch showed a reading of 220 bpm. I was shocked. That wasn’t normal, not even under physical strain.

I visited a couple of GPs over the next few weeks. They ran tests, checked vitals, and ruled out the usual suspects, but none of them could pinpoint the cause. Each time I left the clinic, I felt like I had more questions than answers. Still, I pushed on—working, training, and convincing myself I was just overthinking things.

Then came one particularly rough night on duty. I felt off—more than usual. My girlfriend had been urging me for days to go to the hospital, and that night, I finally gave in. We headed to the A&E. But instead of relief, I left feeling frustrated and dismissed. After a quick X-ray, the doctor implied I was malingering and brushed off my concerns. It was 3am when we left, and I was handed some panadol and just one day of medical leave.

I didn’t know it then, but that night was the beginning of a much bigger fight—one I never saw coming.

I soon found out why I was being transferred to NUH—Ng Teng Fong didn’t have an oncology ward. At that point, I didn’t even know what “oncology” meant. Everything was moving so fast. The doctors told me I needed to undergo a biopsy to better understand what was happening inside my body. It still didn’t fully register, not until I met the oncologist.

That was when things became real. The CT scan had revealed an unknown mass growing in my chest cavity. It was pressing against my heart and lungs, which explained the dangerously high heart rate and blood pressure. My systolic pressure had shot up to 170. They suspected it might be a form of lymphoma. I was stunned. Cancer? Me?

Because of how critical my vitals were, the doctors decided I needed to go for the biopsy that very night. The mass was growing too close to vital organs, and they needed answers quickly. That evening, I was surrounded by my closest family and friends—my parents, my girlfriend, and a few buddies. Everyone important was there. Some were crying, others trying to be strong for me. I tried to keep it together, but deep down, I was terrified.

The operating theatre was cold, the metal table narrow beneath me. They gave me local anesthesia. I was drowsy but still aware of what was happening. At some point during the procedure, I began to feel a strange coldness in my chest. With each breath, I felt more breathless. Then I heard them—urgent voices calling out, “Wilson, breathe! Wilson, breathe!” But I couldn’t.

Panic set in. I couldn’t move, couldn’t respond. And then everything went white. Just silence. I blacked out.

When I arrived at Ng Teng Fong Hospital, things escalated quickly. I was given a red fall-risk tag and wheeled straight into the observation ward. It all felt surreal. One minute I was at home in bed, and the next I was lying under bright hospital lights, surrounded by the beeping of monitors and hushed voices of nurses moving around.

They told me I needed a CT scan to better understand what was going on. A nurse handed me a memo that read “CT Thorax/?abd/pelvis”—it made no sense to me. Medical jargon I couldn’t understand. I snapped a photo of it and quickly updated my close friends and my girlfriend. I tried to stay calm, but the uncertainty gnawed at me.

The wait for the scan felt like forever. I just laid there, staring at the ceiling, trying not to let my thoughts spiral. Eventually, I was taken for the scan, and after what felt like another long stretch of waiting, a doctor finally came back—not with answers, but with more urgency.

They informed me that I would need to be transferred to National University Hospital (NUH) immediately. Ng Teng Fong wasn’t equipped to manage my condition. That sentence alone made my heart race.

I had never been in an ambulance before—never needed to be. Lying there, strapped to the stretcher, sirens in the background, I stared up at the ambulance ceiling, trying to make sense of it all. I wasn’t just a patient anymore—I was someone with a condition serious enough to warrant an emergency transfer.

I didn’t know what lay ahead at NUH, but I knew this was no longer something I could brush off. Something was truly wrong.

Two days later, on 10 September 2015—Cooling-Off Day for the General Elections—I finally had a rare break. Since Cabinet Ministers weren’t allowed to campaign, there were no assignments lined up. I took the chance to sleep in, grateful for the rest. But my rest was cut short when my mum came into my room early in the morning, saying there was a call for me on the house phone.

That immediately felt off. All official communication usually came through my personal mobile—unless I was unreachable. My heart sank. I thought I had somehow missed work or an urgent deployment. But it wasn’t work—it was the hospital.

A nurse was on the line, and her tone was serious. She said they had reviewed my X-ray and found something abnormal. When I asked for details, she refused to say more over the phone and repeated that I needed to return to the hospital as soon as possible. There was something about her voice—calm but firm, slightly tense—that made my stomach turn. I knew it couldn’t be good.

I didn’t want to wait. I didn’t want to second-guess. So I quickly got dressed and took a cab straight to the hospital, choosing not to drive just in case I had to be admitted. The silence in the cab ride was deafening. I stared out the window, running through every possibility in my mind. My face had been swollen for weeks. The chest pain. The racing heartbeat. Everything started to connect, but I didn’t know what it meant.

All I knew was that life, once so steady and full of plans, suddenly felt like it was standing on edge. Something was coming. I just didn’t know what yet.

I don’t know how long I was out, but when I finally opened my eyes, the first thing I felt was an overwhelming pain in my chest. Every breath hurt. My mouth was bone dry, like I hadn’t had water in days. I blinked, trying to focus, and then I saw him—my dad—walking down the corridor toward me.

I’ll never forget that moment. The way he looked at me, forcing a small smile, trying to be strong. He asked gently, “Are you okay?” And I could see the worry in his eyes. No parent should ever have to see their child like that. What was supposed to be a simple 20-minute procedure had stretched into three hours.

A nurse came in shortly after. Still groggy, I asked her if they had to do CPR on me because of the pain in my chest. She shook her head gently and explained what had happened—my lung had collapsed during the biopsy. They had to switch to general anesthesia midway through the procedure, which was why I blacked out.

They gave me some saline for my dry mouth and told me I’d been moved to the high dependency ward for close monitoring. Everything still felt like a blur, but I was slowly piecing it all together. The mass in my chest had caused more complications than they expected.

The biopsy results weren’t out yet, but they couldn’t afford to wait. The oncologist proposed starting me on a generic chemotherapy protocol while waiting for the confirmation. It wasn’t ideal, but it was necessary—to slow things down, to buy time.

Lying there, with tubes in my arms and machines beeping around me, I knew life as I knew it had changed. And the real fight was only just beginning.

A few days later, the biopsy results came back. The diagnosis was clear: Stage 2A Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. It hit me like a truck. I had cancer. At 23. I sat there, trying to process those words, feeling like the walls were closing in. But there was no time to dwell—they already had a treatment plan ready.

I was to start with six cycles of chemotherapy. The first round would be R-CHOP, a strong cocktail meant to hit the cancer hard from the start. After that, five more cycles of EPOCH, another aggressive regimen. Because of my high blood pressure, they couldn’t place any central line on my upper torso—it was too risky. So they inserted a femoral line plug near my groin instead, which made moving around uncomfortable, but it was necessary.

After a few rounds of chemo, my vitals stabilized, and they removed the femoral line. In its place, they inserted a PICC line in my arm to make future chemo sessions more manageable. Still, there wasn’t a clear end in sight. The doctors told me that if the six cycles didn’t work, we’d have to move to radiotherapy. Nothing was guaranteed.

I wanted to believe I could still do all the things I had planned—marry my girlfriend, move into our new home, start the life we’d dreamed of. But everything suddenly felt so uncertain. The future I once saw so clearly was now clouded in fear and doubt. I didn’t know if I would get through this.

After my first cycle of treatment, the side effects hit me hard. My nails started turning black, my hair began to fall out, and I felt a constant churning in my stomach. The doctors had explained it—chemotherapy targets fast-growing cells, and that includes not just cancer, but hair, nails, and even the lining of the stomach. The physical toll was brutal.

Instead of waiting for my hair to fall out in clumps, I decided to take control—I shaved it all off. But what I wasn’t prepared for was losing my eyebrows and eyelashes. Without them, I looked strange… almost alien. I couldn’t recognize myself in the mirror. I started to avoid reflections altogether.

I often found myself wondering, “Why me?” I didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, and led a pretty healthy lifestyle. It felt so unfair. I even went so far as to prepare a photo for my obituary—just in case. That’s how dark things got.

The treatment made me feel worse than the cancer itself. I was constantly exhausted, nauseated, weak, and emotionally drained. There were so many times I wanted to stop, to just give in and let fate take its course. I even thought about telling my girlfriend to leave me. She was still young, with her whole life ahead of her. I didn’t want her to be stuck in this never-ending cycle of hospitals and uncertainty.

But deep down, I couldn’t do it. I wanted to get better—not just for me, but for us. Maybe it was selfish, but I still wanted a future with her. So I pushed on. No matter how broken I felt, I showed up for every treatment. Because giving up wasn’t an option—not yet.

Cycle after cycle, things started to look a little better. The side effects were still tough, but my body began to adjust, and mentally, I tried to stay afloat. After my fourth cycle, the doctors scheduled a scan to assess the progress. The results showed that the tumor had reduced by about half. It was progress—but not the kind of miracle I had secretly hoped for. There was relief, sure, but also fear. What if six cycles weren’t enough? What if I needed more? That uncertainty lingered heavily in the back of my mind.

After the sixth cycle, I was drained—physically, emotionally, everything. And then came my birthday. I turn a year older on the 30th of January, and my girlfriend’s birthday is just two days before mine on the 28th. We had always talked about getting married on the 29th. Cancer had put so much on hold, but this was something we weren’t going to let it take from us.

It wasn’t the celebration we once imagined, but it meant everything. We registered our marriage with our close friends around, carrying both love and uncertainty into that moment. Our BTO flat was coming soon, and by registering that year, we were securing a future we weren’t even sure I’d get to see. It was scary… but it was ours.

Then, a few weeks later in February, we got the call. The scan results were in. I was officially in remission. Hearing those words felt unreal. After everything—the pain, the fear, the chemo—I could finally breathe a little again. For the first time in a long time, hope didn’t feel so far away.

Remission was a huge relief, but life didn’t magically fall back into place. The financial strain had been real. I had exhausted all my hospitalization leave and had been on unpaid leave for a while. Without strong insurance coverage, I had no choice—I had to return to work, even though my hair and eyebrows hadn’t fully grown back. I looked different, and I knew people noticed, but I couldn’t let that hold me back.

Back at work, I pushed myself even harder. I didn’t want to be seen as fragile or given special treatment. It would’ve been easy to use my illness as a reason to coast through. But I chose not to. I took on more responsibilities. I wanted to prove—to myself most of all—that I was still capable, maybe even more so than before.

My wife and I also finally got our dogs—Toby and Cooper, who brought so much warmth into our home. During my treatment, I turned down sperm banking as I wanted to focus on recovery. The doctors had advised it because chemo often affects fertility, but at that point, I just wanted to survive—I wasn’t thinking that far ahead.

Then, just as we were settling into a quiet routine with our second dog, life threw us another surprise. My wife was pregnant.

I remember standing there, holding the test result, completely stunned. After everything we’d been through, after all the things we’d been told… we were going to be parents. Against all odds. It was overwhelming, humbling, and beautiful. A reminder that life still had so much left to give.

Not long after we welcomed our first miracle, life surprised us once again—my wife was pregnant with our second child. We were overjoyed, but at the same time, I began to feel the weight of everything more intensely. My hours at work were long and unpredictable. There were times I’d be away from home for days. The longest was 18 days straight—leaving my pregnant wife and young child at home. I remember lying in bed at the end of those long shifts, wondering if this was really the kind of father and husband I wanted to be.

I felt I needed to do more—not just for myself, but for my family and the people around me. Life had given me a second chance, and I didn’t want to waste it.

By chance, I got into a conversation with a colleague who was leaving the force to become a financial consultant. At the time, I didn’t think much of it. But two years later, we reconnected over a casual catch-up. That conversation planted a seed. For the first time, I saw how my story—my struggles and recovery—could have meaning beyond myself. I knew first-hand what it meant to face a life-threatening illness without adequate insurance. I had lived it. And I wanted to make sure no one else I cared about would have to.

So, amidst the chaos of COVID and with a second baby on the way, I took a leap of faith. I left the force and stepped into a brand new world. It was terrifying—starting from scratch with a family to support—but I was lucky to have the support and blessings of friends and family.

Today, I work closely with people from all walks of life, building trust and sharing what I’ve learned. Through word of mouth and real connections, my clientele has grown. I don’t take any of it for granted. Every conversation is a chance to make a difference—and that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.