Holderness School
DANIEL DO ’13
GETS IT DONE Holderness alum beats cancer, goes to Harvard Medical School
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ittle more than a month after he graduated from Holderness School in the spring of 2013, Daniel Do began to feel a nagging pain in his leg. Daniel, who had plans to try out for the Bowdoin College basketball team that fall, first thought it was a muscle pull. Soon after arriving at Bowdoin, however, the pain had become so debilitating that he couldn’t walk. Daniel, a beneficiary of the Richard R. Hall P ’61 Scholarship Fund while at Holderness, would soon receive devastating news. A visit to a doctor and a subsequent x-ray revealed a shadow on his femur; a follow-up MRI clearly showed a tumor. What followed was a nerve-wracking few weeks during which Daniel’s doctors tried to nail down a diagnosis. At first, his doctors thought he had a sarcoma, or an aggressive form of leukemia. “I remember going on this whole odyssey,” Daniel remembers. “It was only two or three weeks, but for a cancer patient every day is horrible.”
Daniel Do ’13 at Harvard Medical School.
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Finally, on October 4, 2013, doctors diagnosed Daniel with lymphoma, a serious but treatable cancer that required three months of chemotherapy followed by a month of radiation treatments. It was a tough time for Daniel, who had to leave Bowdoin to receive treatment at Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Luckily, though, he wasn’t alone. Soon after learning of Daniel’s diagnosis, the Holderness community rushed into action: students sent him a care package filled with letters; teachers and staff reached out to him; and the school quickly launched a fundraising drive to help offset the cost of his medical care and related
