Kim Dong-ho is a 23-year-old fella who’s doing pull-ups in order to pull himself out of the dark hole that cancer is trying to bury him in.

When Kim Dong-ho was seven years old, several tumors grew in his face and mouth and caused his face to not look like his face.

Initially, the doctors didn’t know what to do because nothing was adding up. They didn’t know if it was mumps, measles, cancer, or what. The docs, though, didn’t give up! They kept at it! The docs did a CT (computed tomography) scan of Kim Dong-ho’s body in order to get a clearer picture of what was going on so that they could properly diagnosis him.

What’d you know! It worked! The CT scan, plus the tumors in the young fella’s face and mouth, led the doctors to diagnose Kim Dong-ho with a rare form of the big “C” called head and neck liposarcoma.

Liposarcoma starts in the fat tissue and is generally found in the areas of the body where fat tends to hang out in abundance like the stomach or the thigh. The head and neck don’t have nearly as much fat as the stomach and thigh. Therefore, head and neck liposarcoma is rare. In fact, head and neck liposarcoma is so rare that it makes up 1% of cases involving liposarcoma. And being in that rare group means that taking a pill or getting a shot doesn’t make the cancer go away.

A person who has head and neck liposarcoma has to either have surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, or all of the above. Kim Dong-ho has had many surgeries that left him not looking like himself. After looking in the mirror and seeing a face that was not his, the young fella became suicidal.

The way he chose to go was over the roof of his apartment. Fortunately, he heard the small voice of his gym teacher in his head. “Let’s try to overcome cancer through exercise,” is what The Hankookilbo folks quoted Kim Dong-ho as saying his gym teacher told him. From that point on, Kim Dong-ho began trying and succeeding.

During the year 2020, in the month of July and a day before he was set to undergo surgery to remove another tumor, Kim Dong-ho entered a pull-up competition that allowed contestants to submit videos of themselves doing pull-ups. Kim Dong-ho submitted his video and won! The win was one of his sweetest because Kim Dong-ho didn’t let the fact that he had to go under the knife again keep him from doing what he loves.

And let me tell you, folks, he’s really good at doing what he loves! In fact, Dong-ho is so good that he can do 70 pull-ups in  a minute!

Now, that’s something there!