Health Makers Peter Kirk 51 CEO of Sermo Everyday Health MenuNewslettersSearch Healthy Living

Health Makers Peter Kirk 51 CEO of Sermo

While leading a company that connects physicians online, Kirk learned firsthand the importance of such information-sharing during his own illness.Reviewed: October 11, 2022 Medically ReviewedPeter Kirk and his wife moved to New York City, and he acquired Sermo.Photo Courtesy of Sermo; iStockBy Peter Kirk as told to Abby Ellin I was a happy, healthy kid growing up in Denmark. Much to my mother’s dismay, at 16 I became an exchange student in the United States, in beautiful North Carolina. It was sunny almost every day, and I fell in love with America. You have a one-year visa to do the high school thing, and then they kick you out. I came back to Denmark, and I was miserable. I just wanted to get back to the United States. After a year in Denmark I applied to college in the States, but I got rejected from literally every one I applied to. Then I got into a community college, Lees-McRae College up in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. Two semesters later I transferred to Appalachian State University, in Boone, North Carolina. I’m not the smartest guy in the room typically, and I don’t always make the smartest choices, but I keep fighting. I get something in my head and then I do it. I managed to get my bachelor’s degree in two and a half years at App State. I graduated with honors in business and then took graduate studies at London Business School, one of the best in the world. That’s where I started a market research company, WorldOne, with $12,000. We were one of the first healthcare companies to get into the early trend of building online panels of doctors. You could get your data collected around the world from one supplier. Our tagline was “One world, one location.” I met my wife, who’s Norwegian, during this time. We decided to move to New York City. At that point, the company had about half a million doctors around the world on our panels. Then I acquired Sermo, which was founded by doctors for doctors in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We hit over a million doctors this year, in 150 countries. Sermo offers a physician-first online community that allows clinicians to communicate about issues that are important to them and their patients. A year before I came to the United States, I had a dumb hip injury and they took a blood test. The doctor told me to see a hematologist. After further tests, I was told that I was neutropenic, a form of pre-leukemia. Every year I had a 20 percent chance of having leukemia. I didn’t know how to handle it. When I moved, the U.S. doctor said don’t worry about it. So I lived 15 years as neutropenic. At year 16 my hearing started dropping. Most doctors I've talked to think the hearing loss and leukemia are connected, but they can’t say for sure. It’s very frustrating. In late October 2020 I threw up three or four times a week, which was not normal for me. I thought I had food poisoning. My wife told me to see Bruce, a grumpy old hematologist at NYU. I remember him reading the numbers on his computer the day he took my blood. “That’s impossible,” he said. “This cannot be true.” He called the lab and said to me, “You can’t go home. This is serious. Call your wife.” I was diagnosed with acute leukemia and double lung pneumonia. The scary part was that I had had a blood test two weeks earlier and everything checked out normal. That’s why they call it “acute” myeloid. It came out of nowhere and was just racing. I had a very weak immune system and was put on a breathing tube for two weeks. They told my wife to spend time with me; they didn’t think I was going to make it. They told her that I was the sickest person in the ICU — and this was at the height of the pandemic. They turned on classical music and a priest came to the door and my wife thanked him for coming but said, “Peter is not going anywhere.” Two days later the drugs started working and my breathing began improving. I survived. I was transferred to Memorial Sloan Kettering and started chemo. On June 9, 2021, I had a bone marrow transplant with 850 million stem cells from a 25-year-old donor from somewhere in the United States. A transplant is both amazing and beautiful. It’s also a pretty big deal. It destroys you, and then you have to recover. A good friend lent us their house in Southampton where I could recover for around a month. I went from not being able to unscrew a Gatorade bottle and spending most of my time on the couch, annoying my wife and three kids, to getting in the swimming pool, then two days later trying to do one lap. Six weeks after the bone marrow transplant, I said, “I gotta get going with exercise.” I was always a fit and athletic guy. I love skiing. I go to the gym, but I didn’t subscribe to any one sport. My plan was to run, and I did — for a minute and 39 seconds. I couldn’t do more. I despaired. Was this the new me? I said to myself, “Peter be happy, you are cancer-free, you have a family. Just be happy. Start doing some old man exercise.” Ten seconds later I was like, “I need a new goal. I’m going to run the New York Marathon!” The goal wasn’t the run itself. The goal became that I would no longer let what happened to me define me. I would define myself as a person who can do things like run a marathon — the running was incidental. I could have chosen a mountaintop. It was about conquering cancer and not being defined mentally or physically as a cancer patient. I practiced, and I ran it in 5 hours and 39 minutes. I cried five times during the race itself. We had an after-party with lots of champagne. But when I woke up the next morning this very unexpected thing happened. I was panicked. What now? I had been so focused, but it was too simple. Too basic. A week later I decided to go for a small run. I ended up doing more than half a marathon. Two days later I did it again. The next week I did it twice again. That’s when I came up with my next challenge — to run 1,000 half marathons over the next 10 years, completing the goal by the 10th anniversary of my transplant. I’ve now done 108 half marathons. We started a charity, called Be Your Possible, and launched an event, called Run With Peter, which took place in June 2022, a year after I had my stem cell transplant. The goal is to raise a million dollars for a range of medical research causes, to enlist doctors and other healthcare professionals to participate in Run With Peter and to raise awareness of exercise as a key part of a healthy lifestyle. We intended Run With Peter to be an annual event. In the inaugural year in 2022, Sermo donated $250,000 to support various medical research causes. Upon registration, the doctor participants selected the area of medical research and foundations they wanted to receive a portion of the overall donation. The top 10 organizations physicians selected included the American Heart Association, St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, the International Society for Infectious Diseases, and the Breast Cancer Research fund, among others. Other organizations included AKTIV Against Cancer, which is dedicated to ensuring physical activity will become an integral part of cancer treatment. The goal is to inspire other people to find their possible. Again, it’s not about the running — it should be about whatever your possible is. Whatever it is, keep pushing. NEWSLETTERS

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