From burnout to recovery: How a cancer diagnosis transformed a workaholic director's life

Desmond Tan was running on fumes when his body finally broke. Two hours of sleep a night, two cups of coffee, two cans of Red Bull—this was his formula for survival during the years when he was at the top of his game as a commercials director in Singapore. His production company, Atypicalfilms, was handling major clients: the Navy, the Air Force, immigration authorities, tech companies, fast food chains, banks. He was flying out of the country for shoots. He was living what looked like the high life. What he was actually doing was destroying himself.

The heart palpitations came first. He felt them and kept moving. In January 2019, a sharp pain seized his lower abdomen. Blood appeared in his stools. He was 41 years old, married with two young sons, and he had convinced himself it was hemorrhoids. A month passed. The pain and bleeding did not stop. When he finally saw a doctor, the diagnosis arrived with the weight of a sentence: Stage 4 colon cancer. The tumor had already spread to his liver.

Tan believes the cancer came from the sleep deprivation. He was sleeping between two and four hours most nights, waking at 3 a.m. to do his own work because those were the only hours available. His mind never left the office. On the day he learned about the tumor, he was in a taxi heading to post-production to perfect burger patties for a commercial. He could not go home. He had clients to answer to. It was not until 11 p.m. that night, sitting with his wife, that the reality broke through and he wept. His son was barely a year old.

What struck him most, in the months that followed, was that he was not alone. An ex-colleague, also a prominent commercials director, had the exact same cancer. That colleague died. Others in the small industry fell ill: breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, lung cancer, colon cancer. Seven people, relatively young and healthy, all hit by serious disease. Something was wrong. Tan began to wonder whether the industry's culture—the unspoken ethic that glamorized long hours and relentless work—was killing people.

He underwent five rounds of chemotherapy and surgery to remove thirteen centimeters of his colon. Six months of treatment. He thought he was clear. Then a follow-up scan showed the cancer had returned, this time spreading to the peritoneum, the membrane lining the abdominal cavity. His wife, a family physician, researched and found oncology surgeon Melissa Teo, who specialized in HIPEC—hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy, a procedure that combines surgery with heated chemotherapy to attack advanced abdominal cancers. Teo had treated another Stage 4 colorectal cancer patient who went on to live more than ten years. Tan described the procedure with the visual precision of a director: she removed the cancer, poured chemotherapy into his abdomen, shook him like bubble tea for an hour, then stitched him up.

Over eighteen months, he endured two surgeries and twenty rounds of chemotherapy. The Covid-19 pandemic arrived in the middle of his recovery. He ran his company remotely, away from crowds, away from infection risk. And something shifted. He began to see the work culture he had built—the brutal hours, the glamorization of exhaustion—not as ambition but as unsustainable. Not as thriving but as the thing that had nearly killed him.

Now, Tan has restructured Atypicalfilms. He caters healthier food on sets. He acknowledges that people are different, that younger workers want their time, their energy, their space—and he agrees with them. He goes to the gym or swims every day. He does not eat processed food. He is still working, still running the company, but the pace has changed. He has changed. In a strange way, he said, he is grateful for the cancer. It forced him to pull the brakes, to slow down, to understand that work is not all there is. If he had kept going at that breakneck speed, he might not be here at all.