Dan was diagnosed with testicular cancer four months after he met his future wife, Stephanie. When he made the phone call to tell her the news, her response surprised him and sealed their future together.

The Diagnosis

On a very hot day Dan and I met at The Market at The Cheshire. After ordering we pulled out chairs at a corner table and took seats opposite each other. As condensation from our cold drinks left dark circles on the wood table, he told me about being diagnosed with cancer at 29, how he knew he would marry Stephanie, and why he started a nonprofit.

At the age of 29, intense back pain had become a normal part of Dan’s life, but one that he just couldn’t get used to. He dreaded waking up in the morning because sleep was his only relief. Even the 16 Advil he popped everyday weren’t enough to dull the excruciating ache. Suicide was never an option, but Dan certainly prayed that he wouldn’t have to live another 40 years this way.

After trying injections and everything else he could think of, Dan’s chiropractor friend recommended that he lay on his back and slowly bring his knees to his chest. Ok, no problem. He started with the right leg and that was just fine, but when he tried to lift the left leg he realized something was seriously wrong. Gently touching his abdomen he located a golf ball sized lump and thought, “Wait, that shouldn’t be there...”

Immediately he consulted with a doctor and learned that he actually had a tumor the size of an NFL football. It had atrophied his left kidney and was pushing sideways on his spine. Within 8 days of locating the tumor, Dan was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Not a happy diagnosis by any stretch, but one of the most curable types.

The Number Four

One fateful night just four months before he got the news, Dan joined a group of friends at a bar. It was here that he was introduced to Stephanie, another member of the group and they danced together most of the evening. As the night wore on they shared their first kiss and connected over their twin four leaf clover tattoos.

Just four months later Dan picked up the phone to tell her about his diagnosis. When he finished there was silence on the other end of the line. “If you don‘t want to be here for this, I understand,” he told her, trying not to hope. Her response took him by surprise, “No. We’re going to fight this every step of the way together.”

When he hung up the phone, he looked at his parents for a moment before telling them. “I’m going to marry that girl. I’m going to the jewelers this weekend and getting her a ring and I’m going to marry that girl.” On St. Patrick’s day he popped the question and started chemo the following Monday.

Diffusing Cancer

Imagine (or remember) telling someone for the first time that you have cancer. The anticipation of their reaction, the ‘I’m so sorry’ look they’ll give you, and even worse the tears. Dan coached me on the best way to react when you get news like this.

“There’s not a single platitude you can say that’s going to make a cancer person feel better, but if you can diffuse it… believe it or not, that helps.” Rather than the ‘I’m so sorry’ that comes naturally, he advises asking more questions. “If you’ve never had cancer, no one close to you has had cancer and the elephant in the room comes out, usually a person’s first reaction is ‘oh my god, I’m so sorry’. You know and that’s… that’s nice. But if someone ever lets it out of the bag, ‘Oh I had cancer’ or ‘I have cancer’, I never say I’m sorry. My first question is, ‘what kind?’”

The questions that follow aren’t easy, but he explains that they really help diffuse the situation. Do you have to have chemo? And, are you going to lose a part? He smiled, “I lost lefty. Shit happens.”

The Friends Who Weren’t There

“Some friends… and they’re true friends, I’m not saying they’re not true friends because it does affect everybody, but some of my friends kind of disappeared when I got diagnosed. And I’m ok with that because everybody handles stuff differently.”

It’s unfortunate that some of his friendships went away, but he wants to educate cancer patients and the public that just because you don’t know how to handle it, you don’t have to hide from it. So, he started a nonprofit called The Half Fund.

“After cancer, I found that I made a lot of really stupid mistakes. And I mean there were some things I could have avoided and there were some things I really should have avoided. I even saw them coming and I still couldn’t get out of the way of my idiocy, so I wanted to help others to not make the same mistakes.”

The Half Fund

The idea was initially born because a screenplay was the only way Dan could think of to share his experiences. But… the first version “sucked ass”. He didn’t give up, though and eventually wrote something that cleared the entire bureaucracy of the American Cancer Society in 2 hours. The national office called him and agreed to let him use their name and logo and help with the marketing of the film once it’s made.

The ACS also suggested that Dan create his own nonprofit to generate money for filming and thus The Half Fund was born. The way it works is any artistic project (art, film, literature, etc.) that gets funding from The Half Fund, must split their profits in half. One half must go to a cancer charity and the other half goes to back to the Half Fund. Every year they’ve raised between 10 and 15 thousand dollars this way.

Cancer is definitely not something you ask for, but in a way Dan is thankful because it gave him his life purpose. “The whole reason why we’re doing this is, we HAVE to tell our stories. They honor the people who come before us and they help the people who come after us.”

“Chemistry just like, explains life. I mean, everything is made up of what you can describe with chemistry.” Paul was a chemist at Covidien before he took the leap and co-founded a solar energy company here in St. Louis. What gave him the courage to take this bold step? Two things. First, he had some terrible experiences working at a local pharmaceutical company (including being directly exposed to carcinogens). Second, he re-connected with a college buddy who was also frustrated with his job. 

A Second Meeting

It had the kind of day that makes you feel guilty if you’re not outside, sunny and warm with just the slightest breeze. I took my time walking from the office to the Washington Post, where Paul held a table for our 7pm meeting. This wasn’t the first time we’d met. At an SBA (small business administration) talk a few weeks prior we exchanged cards with the promise of a coffee meeting in the near future, and here we were! 

I chit-chatted with the barista as we waited for our drinks, then slipped into the booth opposite Paul. Immediately he began telling me about his experiences leading up to becoming an entrepreneur.

A Rough Start

Freshman year, Paul attended college in Jacksonville, Illinois at a very small private school. After only one year he realized this small, rural school wasn’t his M.O. But, before he transferred to Carbondale, he met Kyle. The two quickly became friends and stayed in touch after Paul left.

Even after the transfer, Paul struggled to decide on a major, changing it four times before finally settling on chemistry simply because he’d done well in high school. Thanks to Breaking Bad, he had some strange people approach him when he made that decision. “When I was first getting into it, you’d always get those people like, ‘oh, you can make acid, right?’”, he said using a dopey voice. His response: “I’m like, ‘No. Get away from me.’ They really thought that like, I had the ability to like… do that. Which, I mean… I guess. But most things are specialized.”

After graduation he was lucky and easily found a job at Covidien, then Sigma-Aldrich where he did quality control for different chemicals. The work involved significant risk because he was working with very serious chemicals. One of the most dangerous things that Paul discovered during his work here, was a lab that wasn’t set-up properly and had been blasting carcinogens into the space where he and other employees worked. So he swabbed a wall of the room and found dangerously high levels of the chemical. “Stuff like that happened occasionally,” he said shaking his head.

“Obviously one of the reasons I wanted to get out of the whole industry was because, when you’re at that level you’re like a peon. You do what they tell you to do. You put your health and everything else at risk for them to make an extra buck. You get a decent salary, but at what cost? Not to mention the environmental cost and everything else they don’t even consider because it has nothing to do with the dollars in their pocket. It’s just totally against everything I believe.”

It Was Kismet

One day at work, Paul decided to take action and sent an email to HR about a supervisor that had been giving him a lot of trouble. This was his last resort, as the situation had been escalating for months and had left him miserable. He understood the odds of anything being done about it and he knew that sending this message was basically writing his own death note, but he didn’t know what else to do. Within minutes of sending that email, he received a different email from a former employer asking if he was interested in interviewing for a position in this smaller company, called Dynalab.

“I started crying, I was so emotional at that point. The next day I was interviewing there.” The rest is history. Until Kyle and Paul started EFS Energy and eventually, it couldn’t be contained. The company was growing so quickly that he had to say goodbye to the team at Dynalab after a relatively short period of time and devote himself to the solar company full-time.

The Energy Proposition

The passage of proposition C, or the Clean Energy Act, in 2008 paved the way for companies like EFS Energy to crop up all over the state. Publicly owned utility companies were required to pay a rebate to anyone who installed solar, forcing companies like Ameren to add solar to their portfolio. Practically overnight the sun-powered energy industry began to boom in the state.

While installing solar is still cost-efficient, the rebates from Ameren dried up in December because of a loophole. Their attorney’s interpreted the language of this act to mean that rebates could be capped at 1% “of something”, Paul said indignantly. Initially the program was to be stepped down over a period of 6 years, but instead it was just gone and many new solar companies and jobs were lost. Don’t worry about EFS, though, they were one step ahead. “This kind of came at an ok time because we’re gonna use this as a platform to expand into other areas of energy efficiency.”

The Awesome, Excellent, So Good, Very Great Year

The life of a small business owner is always an adventure, but Paul is loving it. He looks forward to the future of solar energy and how it could lead to more sustainable communities. “That’s what I want to be a part of, and that’s why I left my chemistry career.”

While things are sailing along for EFS Energy, it’s not the only great thing to happen for Paul this year. He and his wife are now parents! Photos of his adopted son Mitchell have taken over his phone and he proudly stretched over the table to show me. “He looks so…” I started to tell him how alike they look but he cut me off. “Jedi?” Not exactly what I was going to say, but hilarious! As we scrolled through more than 10 pictures, he commented on each one. “It’s really good when I can get him to laugh.” “He looks like a little Obi-wan.” “Almost every picture on my phone is him now.” 

No Brainer

Despite an interesting conversation, we were both eagerly anticipating that first step out into a perfect summer day. So I made my routine query,“What is your favorite thing about St. Louis?” The question had barely left my lips before Paul blurted out his answer with a smile. “City museum.”