‘What changed was finding that I could stick to a regimen and follow a process to get me to the finish line. I got down to 172 pounds.’

NOAH LAM, STONY BROOK

“I was overweight at 245 pounds in 2007, balancing a pint of ice cream on my belly and watching Forrest Gump run across America. I decided to run the 2008 New York City Marathon. I was totally clueless and started with a 10K, then learned about 5K runs. It took me a while to figure out the schedule. What changed was finding that I could stick to a regimen and follow a process to get me to the finish line. I got down to 172 pounds.

“In 2013, I had a seizure. Waking up in the hospital made me think about life and all the possibilities that I have not ventured. I had wanted to register for a full Ironman. I couldn’t even swim across the pool, let alone do a 2.4-mile swim.

“My biggest inspiration to try the triathlon was when my then-preteen daughter was feeling stuck in life, and we talked about change. She said she knew it was possible because she’d seen me do it. Knowing that she’d been watching, and that I’d made an impact on her, shifted the focus for me.

“Since then, I’ve completed 12 marathons and one full Ironman triathlon in 2014: 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike and a 26.2-mile run. From the Ironman, I understood that I could do more than I thought was possible.

“My fitness journey inspired my wife to also do marathons as well as a full Ironman triathlon. And that led to my son starting to get into triathlon. He got competitive and really good at the sport. But I realized going to different races around the country that it wasn’t available to a lot of kids. I noticed that there was a big gap between who’s doing racing and who’s not doing racing. There was no real program out there that had kids doing triathlon as a sport.

“I decided to pay it forward by creating the nonprofit youth triathlon team the Lightning Warriors in 2017. The mission is triathlon for all kids. The vision is that encouraging lifelong fitness begins by inspiring our youth. We have about 111 boys and girls ages 7 to 17 on the roster now from both counties and Brooklyn and Queens.”

I learned the cancer has been growing for about 10 years, which means I’ve been swimming, biking and running with it growing.

“Since creating the team, we’ve helped hundreds of kids cross the finish line of different youth triathlons, including our own race, the Mini Maniac Youth Triathlon, established in 2019. We’ve supported several kids who qualify for nationals, and one has qualified for worlds 2024.

“Also, in 2023, we earned the New York State high school club championship. We help families who cannot afford to participate. But towards the end of July 2023, I was diagnosed with a nodule in the thyroid, and with further tests and scans, it turned out to be a metastasized papillary thyroid carcinoma infiltrating the thyroid, surrounding lymph nodes and moved a little to the lungs.

“It’s a slow-growing cancer that was finally discovered by a pre-exam for a colonoscopy. I learned the cancer has been growing for about 10 years, which means I’ve been swimming, biking and running with it growing. I believe that if I were not that active, we probably wouldn’t be having this dialogue. But my family and I are very glad that we can now stop it, so I can continue to help more kids and do more things for the community.

“I’m doing a clinical trial to reduce the cancer to make my surgery less morbid. I’ve gained some weight with all the stress, but now that we have a solution, I’m feeling better and getting back on the horse to get back into shape. I don’t think I would have been able to deal with this mentally without the training that I’ve done. With all my training, I’ve learned you can push through a lot more than you think you could. I would say weight loss is a big factor in terms of making sure this is managed a little bit better.

“I recommend everyone always get a checkup. I think we take things for granted and don’t realize how important we are in people’s lives, so we need to maintain our health.

“Having the big picture and vision that involves knowing that you need to stay healthy, and that you can lean on others to make sure that your vision happens, is important.”

Interviewed by Liza N. Burby

‘I remember one time my mother and I were arguing about something, and I slammed my bedroom door in anger, which accidentally slammed on her hand.’

David Morgan, Stony Brook

“I had a hard time in school when I was a kid. At one point, I actually went to the guidance counselor to see if I could be put into special education classes. My grades were bad, but standardized testing showed I had a high average IQ. It turned out I had an attention deficit disorder, but that really wasn’t something kids were diagnosed with back then.

“I was also a very angry kid, which was caused by my attention issues. I got into some fights. Although I didn’t really seek them out, it was more about being tough and not being someone that you’d want to mess with.

“I remember one time my mother and I were arguing about something, and I slammed my bedroom door in anger, which accidentally slammed on her hand. I still feel terrible about that today.

“Most of my anger went toward my parents, but I also played football and lacrosse, which was an outlet for some of that anger. Coaches would say ‘Get angry’ to motivate players, which, looking back, wasn’t probably the best thing to tell a kid like me. My parents did have me see a therapist, who ended up telling me I was just lazy, which is wrong. Aside from sports, I did jobs like delivering Newsday, mowing lawns and things like that.

“I started at Suffolk Community College, where I figured, after two years, I’d finish and become a cop. However, I started getting good grades, probably because of the different style of teaching you get in college, and after taking a psychology class, found myself going in a new direction. I then went to [SUNY] Oswego, and then to Stony Brook [University], where I got my master’s degree.

“Soon after, I started working at John T. Mather Memorial Hospital, where I often worked with kids, mostly boys, in the psychiatric emergency room. Maybe it was because of my experiences growing up, but I felt like I was connecting with a lot of the patients.

“I also worked in my own practice as a psychotherapist. It was during this work I began to get an idea of how anger was a factor in some psychiatric situations and also how it was impacting people’s lives — but also based on what I went through as a kid.”

We try and teach people to not let things lead to anger. If your boss is giving you a hard time, leave it at work.

“Anger is a secondary emotion. It comes from a primitive part of our brain called the amygdala. At one time, anger was more of an important function we used to protect ourselves, but today it can cause us a lot of problems. It’s like if there’s a triangle, anger is at the peak. Below that is an initial emotional response, and at the bottom there’s an unresolved issue. If we can’t resolve something with our first emotional response, we get angry.

“Today I’m the director of operations of Anger Management U, a company that teaches anger management skills to people of all ages. A lot of people come to us because of how their anger issues are affecting their relationships, but anger is important to address for other reasons. It can lead to unhappiness and depression, whether it’s because someone is acting out or pointing it inward. It can be harder to spot in someone who isn’t clearly angry, but maybe instead is acting in a passive-aggressive way.

“It can also be caused by frustration, like what I went through as a kid. We try and teach people to not let things lead to anger. If your boss is giving you a hard time, leave it at work instead of coming home and yelling at your spouse. If you’re driving, try to think of the consequences of what getting angry can be.

“A lot of times anger is associated with being a man, and a scary man can be more obvious and intimidating when a man is larger, but women can have anger issues too, and while sometimes a male is told things like ‘Man up’ and ‘Act like a man’ when it comes to their emotions, women may be told to be more ‘ladylike.’ Anger can interfere with a woman’s life, too, so really anyone can benefit from learning how to deal with their anger. I personally think they should teach anger management in school. I wish when I was a kid someone recognized what I was dealing with; it would have helped a lot.”

Interviewed by Ian Stark

‘The best part of pet therapy is I know that for the hour we were there that day, Brody actually took away somebody’s anxiety for a little while.’

Stony Brook

“We got Brody as a puppy. When he was about 2 years old, I decided that I wanted to volunteer. My kids had gone off to college. I loved dogs, and I was obsessed with Brody, so I decided to do pet therapy.

“I talked with Stony Brook Hospital, and they took him on. We volunteered twice a week in the pediatric unit for years. We met Kayla when she was 14. She was diagnosed with cancer in 2018 and was in and out of Stony Brook for one year. We visited with her once a week for a year. Once in a while, she would shoot me a message and ask, ‘Is there any way Brody could come visit me?’ So, we would head over there on a day that we weren’t supposed to volunteer and visit her.

Brody’s only 6, and I want to keep doing this with him: keep reaching people, touching people and keep having him spread his love.

“Being Brody’s handler and working together, you’re not supposed to get emotionally involved in a situation. But Kayla went to Sachem and I was a Sachem graduate; it’s hard to say, ‘I’m not going to get attached.’ One day I went in and I saw them wheeling Kayla down the hallway, and she didn’t look like Kayla anymore. She made eye contact with me, and she requested that she say goodbye to Brody, and they asked me if I felt comfortable with that. I asked them to give me a couple minutes to think about it because I was really emotional, but I pulled myself together and thought, ‘This is a tough kid. And if she could do what she’s doing, then I can take five minutes out of my life and toughen up and go in there and visit her.’ And that’s what we did. Brody and I went in there; she petted him and I cried. Within maybe 24 hours, she had passed away. It’s such a mixture of feeling privileged to be able to be in that moment and then a sadness that comes with it.

“Now we volunteer at a hospice, and I really love it. It gives patients who are nearing the end of their lives a chance to not think about reality for a little while, while they pet Brody and they feed him and he licks them.

“The best part of pet therapy is I know that for the hour we were there that day, Brody actually took away somebody’s anxiety for a little while. Brody’s only 6, and I want to keep doing this with him: keep reaching people, touching people and keep having him spread his love.”

Interviewed by Hannah Fusaro

‘I think no matter what you go through in this life, no matter what cards you’re dealt, you have to go through it with grace.’

Stony Brook

“I had a kidney biopsy in January 2012, and they said at some point I would need a kidney transplant or dialysis. I was 39. In 2015, I was diagnosed with chronic myelogenous leukemia. I was shocked, but my doctor said I’d be fine; I’d just have to take a pill for the rest of my life.

“A month later, I had only 10 percent kidney function in both of my kidneys and I needed immediate dialysis. I was 40 years old and in a dialysis chair and that was my life for almost three years. I felt like a machine, and I just thought, ‘I have to be here for my two kids. I can’t die.’ On January 6, 2015, I met my kidney donor and had a replacement. She’s a very important person to me and we’ve stayed connected. I became a type 1 diabetic after my transplant. Then two years ago, I got diagnosed with breast cancer on a routine mammogram. I thought it was the end of the world. I knew what I was facing with my kidney problems, but breast cancer, that was something else altogether.

Our health is the only thing we have, and we have to treat it with kid gloves because it could be gone and things happen so quickly.

“In June 2019, I had my double mastectomy and in February 2020, I had reconstruction surgery and recovered during quarantine. The hardest part was recognizing that my health was just always going to be hanging in the balance; I was always going to have to fight for something. Then my kidney donor told me she had colon cancer and that was what made me decide I had to make a change for my health. I was given the gift of being in remission from leukemia, getting a second chance with a kidney, being cancer-free from breast cancer. It won’t always be perfect. I face every day and the challenges that it brings with positivity.

“I joined a weight-loss group online a year ago. I lost 40 pounds and now I’m coaching other people to do the same thing. A year later, my labs are good, and my donor is well. I’ve had to deal with so much and manage so many things that aren’t normal to most people. So, whatever gets thrown at me, I bat it back.

“Our health is the only thing we have, and we have to treat it with kid gloves because it could be gone and things happen so quickly. I think no matter what you go through in this life, no matter what cards you’re dealt, you have to go through it with grace. Just do everything you can to be healthy because every penny spent on that is one less dollar spent on being unwell.”

‘While being born, I almost died. It’s why I became a physician.’

Stony Brook

“My mother had to get an emergency C-section after realizing I wasn’t moving in the womb. It turned out my umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck. I only had about a half-hour to survive, so the C-section was done immediately, less than 10 minutes after my mom went through the ER doors.

“While growing up my grandmother said the doctors who saved me had a mission, which then became my mission in life; that I should become a doctor, to serve and cure others. That inspired me.

“I’m originally from Peru, where there’s a great tropical medicine institute. I studied infectious diseases, especially because of cholera, which in Peru impacts a lot of people. When something like that becomes a problem, it’s a challenge to stop or to control it.

“I made my way to Stony Brook University Hospital for its strong research program, which meant opportunities where I could make a difference. Over the past five years, I’ve focused on Lyme Disease, a common vector-borne illness.

I remember one patient who said he was suffering for a year, and we started his treatment all over again with testing, which came back positive for Lyme

“I had never seen Lyme before coming to Stony Brook. There are ticks in Peru, but to learn about tick-borne diseases here on Long Island, I had to start from scratch. One thing I found were patients not thinking they had a tickborne infection, even with the telltale rashes on their skin. One even told me he saw three doctors, but none gave him a Lyme disease test, although he had symptoms and the rashes.

“These kinds of things really hit me because these people are suffering and going several places but not getting answers. I remember one patient who said he was suffering for a year, and we started his treatment all over again with testing, which came back positive for Lyme. After using antibiotics for a while, he completely resolved his symptoms. That was one of those cases that makes you feel like you are helping people as you should be.

“I think the future should be to develop a vaccine for tick bites, as we’ll never be able to eliminate ticks, so right now it’s about finding answers and then finding a vaccine. That would be meaningful and rewarding, which is exactly like what my grandmom wanted. I can’t see myself doing any other job.”

The person profiled here has been a guest on Newsday Live.

Interviewed by Ian J. Stark