cancer-1I had driven to Philadelphia to meet with a client-I’ve been working in securities at Goldman Sachs for 13 years-when I got the call from my wife: Something was wrong with Brent, our 2-year-old son. The doctors sald he had pneumonia, but my wife had a gut feeling it was something worse. She had taken him to Yale-New Haven Hospital, but couldn’t go with him into the CAT-scan room because she was pregnant. I drove as fast as I could. Hours later, the doctors said Brent had an aggressive cancer called neuroblastoma, and it was in stage IV. We’d never heard this crazy word, and suddenly they were telling us our happy child had a tumor in his abdomen so large that it actually affected the way he walked. In the days before my wife had taken him to the doctor, he had seemed a little Off-cranky, lethargic-but there were no real warning signs. He started chemo two days later, and my wife and I quickty realized that our life as we knew it was over.

Each year, doctors diagnose 500 to 1,000 children in the U.S. with neuroblastoma, which usually starts in the adrenal glands and spreads through the nervous system. Only about 30 percent of these kids beat the disease, a figure complicated by the lack of warning signs. But we were lucky. We saw success in Brent’s chemo treatments, and we began to feel as if there was something more we could do to help. The great part was that everyone we knew-even strangers in the community-offered their support. So we started teambrent.com to raise money and awareness to fight childhood cancers. We support SI. Baldrick’s, an international foundation that encourages adults and kids to shave their heads in exchange for charitable donations. That first year, so many people wanted to see me shave my head that my friends and I raised $87,000 in just 10 days. In the past two years, we’ve raised about $1.3 million for research. but more money is desperately needed. Cancer research for children receives less than 4 percent of the money that goes to cancer research for adults.

Today, Brent is 5, and after six rounds of chemo, three major surgeries, full-body radiation, and two stem-cell transplants, he has been cancer free for two years. But he has another year to go before he’s in the clear. When people tell us he’s winning,l compare it to a baseball game in the sixth inning-anything can happen. We’re one bad conversation away from a completely different scenario. No matter what, I’ll never stop trying to figure out what causes this thing. What I’ve done is what any other dad would do-try to save his son’s life.