It was Christmas Eve, 2012. I tried to dress up for a colleague’s wedding dinner but a terrible wave of fatigue had started setting in since noon. With each passing hour, each step that I took became increasingly difficult. Each act of buttoning my shirt was happening in slow-motion — left hand to buttonhole, right to button; match, insert, three more to go.

An inexorable amount of time later, I was driving out of my home. No more than one kilometre after, I felt a sudden urge to throw up. Something was terribly wrong. I parked to the side of the street and texted my colleague that I could not make it to her wedding.

The next person I called was my doctor. I had been diagnosed with spontaneous IgA nephropathy (Berger’s disease) three years prior. I was fit and in my 30s, my doctor and I had been trying to prolong the function of my kidney for as long as possible. He recommended that I immediately be warded to Mt Elizabeth Hospital and it was not long before I was given the news that I had suffered end-stage renal failure.

I had to be hospitalised immediately and put on dialysis where an incision was made between my second and third upper rib bone to allow a dialysis catheter to be inserted directly into my internal jugular vein, just below my neck and facing down into my heart.

Even though I knew this was inevitable, It was hard to accept.

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Staring up at the ceiling of the operating room on Christmas Eve (could fate be any more cruel), I wondered why this happened to me. I am an ex-national fencer for crying out loud, I exercise frequently and watch my diet. What is next? Is life as I know it over? Can I continue to work? Is there someone out there who would love me and accept me as I am?

To add insult to injury, I had gone through a divorce two years earlier and had to close down an ice cream business that operated in the mid-2000s — it was a million-dollar failure. At one point during this dark period of my life, I had only $12.50 in my bank account.

When it rains, it pours.

Thankfully, I had the unreserved support of my family and a group of amazing friends, my then girlfriend and colleagues. I eventually had a successful kidney transplant, rose up the ranks to head Groupon APAC’s Key Accounts Business Development teams across six countries from Australia to Japan, and became a seed investor and founding team member of a tech startup called Fave (some readers might know us as the company that bought Groupon South-East Asia’s businesses).

To cap it off, I was the recipient of the “Leading CEO” award at the 13th Singapore HR Awards in 2018. The difference a decade makes!

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Second Chances
Steve Jobs said it best, “you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards”. It was through fencing that connected me to a fellow national fencer and MIT graduate who recruited me to the Internet company he founded in the mid-1990s, which led me to start my own reverse-auction group buying website in 2000.