By AryanI built a startup for cancer patients and caregivers. It worked. People used it during one of the hardest stretches of their lives, and it made things a little more manageable. Then I had to walk away from it.
Not a comeback story. Just what happened. And it starts before the app ever existed. With my father.
the year I became a caregiver
I was sixteen the year my father fought his last fight.
He'd always been a fighter. For as long as I'd been alive, that's who he was: pushing forward, never quitting, always giving it everything he had. Cancer didn't change that. He fought it the same way he fought everything else, all the way to the end.
From the day he was diagnosed, I never heard him complain. Not once. Every day was a step forward, even on the days that were actually a few steps back on the health side. We didn't dwell on what was going wrong. We looked at what we could still do: how to get better, how to actually live, not just survive the diagnosis.
I drove him to chemo appointments. We spent real time together, not just occupying the same room. We talked about old memories. We made new ones on purpose, because we knew the time wasn't unlimited.
Somewhere in that year, I landed on something I still believe. Everything ends. A computer. A piece of trash. An insect. A person. Doesn't matter what it is. The only thing life actually promises you is death.
I don't say that to be bleak. It's just true. And it's the thing that made that year feel different from every other year of my life.
what I noticed two years later
Two years later, I finally understood what that year had shown me.
We had a lot of people. My whole family showed up for my father, someone was always there. Most people don't get that. Most are doing this with one or two family members. Some are doing it completely alone.
And even with all the help we had, it was still confusing as hell. Jargon. Emails. Messages. Stacks of medical reports you're supposed to interpret while someone you love is falling apart in front of you. Nobody hands you a translator for any of it.
That's when it started, even though I hadn't built anything yet. I just noticed the gap. Between what we had, and what most people are actually working with.
what I built
That gap didn't leave me alone. So I built something for it. Not right away, and not as a side project. I put real time into it, the kind of time you only give something you actually care about.
CareCompanion was a web app and an iOS app, built around the things I wished someone had handed us that year. Appointments and medications out of a group text. Symptoms tracked instead of half-remembered in a ten-minute appointment. A clinical trial finder that pulled from Apple Health and searched on its own, instead of costing hours nobody has to spare.
CareCompanion ended up failing. I lost hours and hours of time and effort into it, time that could have gone somewhere else. I don't regret a single one of them. Failing taught me more than succeeding ever would have.
That's where I really learned how important time is. You don't get it back. Not a single hour of it, ever. You can lose money and make more. You can lose a job and find another. Time doesn't work that way. Once it's spent, it's spent, and no amount of effort earns it back.
Before this, I was a kid who spent most of his day sitting at home playing video games. Building this app is what pulled me out of that. It gave me a kind of motivation I hadn't had before, the kind where you set a goal and you don't stop until you've actually gotten there. This was the start of that. Not the app surviving. Me changing because of it.
final thought
That's the part that stayed. Not the app. Me.
CareCompanion is gone. My father is gone too. Neither of those endings erased what they gave me.
I know what an hour is actually worth now. I don't think I'd have learned that any other way.
Love you, dad.