Aut Viam Inveniam Aut Faciam | I Will Find A Way or Make One
There are seasons when the road simply disappears. Suffering, hardship, and loss do not have to define us. They can become the catalyst that teaches us how to keep moving forward when no clear path remains. I did not learn this from a book.
Years ago a near-fatal car accident left me with injuries to the liver, kidney, and spleen, a partially collapsed lung, chipped vertebrae, and a brain bleed. I was airlifted to the University of Pennsylvania, spent a week in the ICU of which I have no memory, and required months of cognitive rehabilitation. The brain bleed ended my amateur boxing career fighting out of Upper Darby. The medical team told my family I might never live independently again. That experience forced a decision that has guided every chapter since: I would find a way, or I would make one.
The same choice had already been forming in earlier years. I grew up with limited resources and watched many of the people around me disappear to violence, addiction, incarceration, or early death. Those realities produced a practical resilience and an intolerance for accepting hard circumstances as final. After recovering from the accident I returned to school, working full-time while attending school full-time, and graduated from Jefferson University summa cum laude with a 4.0. Each time the path narrowed, the same decision returned.
Years later that same refusal to quit put me in Jefferson’s Emergency Department, where I was working as an EMT, on a night I will never forget. A young woman named Sosa was dying of stage-four breast cancer. Her brother stood outside her room with tears streaming down his face. He had already accepted that she was going to die. What he could not accept was listening to her struggle for each breath at night because the family could no longer afford the oxygen she needed. I still remember that conversation as if it happened yesterday. The pain that night was palpable. Until that moment I had planned to go to medical school with my sights set on becoming an anesthesiologist. I did not know then that the conversation would shape the rest of my life, but I knew something inside me had changed. I could not walk away.
I founded Legacy of Hope from that conversation. We started with almost nothing. People told me providing emergency support for cancer patients was going up against problems that were too big and too entrenched. The same ethos answered: find a way or make one. Today the Emergency Patient Support Network delivers food, housing stability, utilities, and other critical support in less than twenty-four hours when all other hospital, community, and family resources have been exhausted. Legacy of Hope provides emergency support for thousands of patients and families across two states and the organization will be national within the next five years. Our model has been independently studied and published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. In 2024 I was invited to present that work at the American Society of Preventive Oncology national conference in Chicago. The results matter more than the origin story: families stay housed, children stay fed, and patients can focus on treatment instead of crisis.
These are not rare cases. Every week, seven days a week, Legacy of Hope receives emergency referrals from major health systems for families in crisis. A firefighter forced by cancer to sell nearly everything in his home so his wife and children could eat—sleeping on the floor, unsure where the next meal would come from or how to keep the utilities on. Another father with metastatic disease whose two children were also sick; they lost their home, the car was vandalized and no longer worked, and the heat was shut off. A single mother living in a car with her children after being evicted. These situations repeat. The Emergency Patient Support Network exists so these crises can end differently—and quickly.
I have never had cancer. But I know what it is to face long odds and keep moving. I know what it is to feel the ground give way and still decide the next step is possible. That knowledge is why I refuse to accept a world in which a cancer diagnosis means a family loses its home or goes without food. I often tell patients and families that I may not yet know the exact path forward, but I will walk it with them.
That same commitment is why, on September 12th and 13th, thirty athletes and I will climb the Rocky Steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art for twenty-four continuous hours as part of PHL24. We are climbing to raise $250,000 so more families never face the choices Sosa’s family faced. People have said raising a quarter of a million dollars to continue this emergency support—without a professional fundraising team—is impossible. The same voices that once said providing the support itself was too lofty. I cannot stop. We cannot stop. The alternative is families in their 11th hour fighting alone. That will never happen. I will be on those steps the entire time—not because the climb is easy, but because the people we serve do not get to take a break. The same ethos that carried me through my own hardest seasons is the one we bring to the steps: we will find a way, or we will make one.
If you are training right now, keep going. The early mornings and heavy legs are the same pressures that build the capacity to show up when it matters most. Every mile and every dollar becomes a lifeline for a family that has nowhere else to turn.
If you believe no one should face cancer alone, there is a place for you in this work. Donate. Share this story. Sponsor an athlete. Or step onto the steps yourself. The work grows when more of us decide that the absence of a clear path is not a reason to stop.
That is the ethos that built Legacy of Hope. It is why we will be on the Rocky Steps in September. I hope you will join us.
When people who know what it is to fall, decide to keep rising for others, hope becomes real.
David N. April Legacy Home: Legacy of Hope purchased and completely renovated this West Philadelphia home, which is now used to provide free short term housing for cancer patients and families facing eviction when they are too sick to work.