Doug Lindsay had just started his senior year Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri when he came home from his first day of class only to have his life change forever. He had no idea at the time that he was embarking on a thirteen year “final project” that would prove to be the fight of his life.

Doug was 21 years-old back in 1999 when the room started spinning around him and he collapsed on the dining room table. At the time, he was a former high school track athlete and biology major who saw himself becoming a biochemistry professor. However, he also always wondered what sidelined his mother and aunt in their early adult years would eventually hit him, too.

“When I called my mom that night to tell her I needed to drop out (of college), we both knew,” he recalled.

His mother grew progressively weaker to the point that she could not pick up her son when he was 18 months-old. By the time Doug was four, she could not walk, and though she lived on for decades and had tons of medical tests done, doctors were never able to figure out what the disease was.

When Doug began losing his ability to stand and walk, doctors were just as baffled as they had been when his mother was sick. After one doctor told Doug that he should see a psychiatrist, he realized that it was going to be up to him to find a cure himself.

While spending 22 hours a day in a hospital bed in his living room, Doug worked through the clues by pouring over medical books. One of the books he read through was a 2,200-page endocrinology textbook he’d picked up from a trashcan on his campus. When reading the book for a second time, one passage struck him and gave him a brilliant idea.

Doug’s mother had always thought her condition was related to her thyroid somehow, but this book told him that adrenal gland problems can share the same symptoms with thyroid issues. This led to Doug figuring out that there was an entire class of diseases of the nervous system still undiscovered by medicine.

Once he figured this out, Doug went about trying to find a doctor who would be brave enough to try out new discoveries. That’s how he found Dr. H. Cecil Coghlan, a medical professor at the University of Alabama–Birmingham.

When Coghlan heard Doug out, he immediately figured out that he was on to something, so he teamed up with him to begin an IV protocol of noradrenalin to counter any excessive adrenalin his glands might be producing. Usually prescribed to patients to raise blood pressure, the drug worked well enough to get Doug walking again for short periods around the house, and he was hooked up to the bag of liquid continually for six years.

Coghlan believed that an adrenal tumor was the reason that Doug was producing so much adrenaline in the first place, yet three different scans all came up negative. Unfazed, Doug did more research and started thinking that something else could be acting like a tumor, causing his glands to misbehave.

Finally, a fourth scan showed Doug’s adrenals glowing brightly, and Coughlan gleefully called him to say “we found it!” Doug was then diagnosed with bilateral adrenal medullary hyperplasia. The medulla is the interior region of the adrenal gland, and it was discovered that it had grown enlarged acting like a tumor, proving that Doug was right all along.

After eighteen months of searching for a surgeon, Doug finally found someone who was willing to perform surgery to extract one of his medullas. The surgery was a huge success, and Doug’s second medulla was extracted two years later. Now, he has become a medical consultant for rare diseases.

“I can travel and give speeches and go for walks…And, I can try to change the world,” he said.

Find out more about his incredible story in the video below.