'It Felt Like Getting Hit by a Car': Han Do-gon Shares His Blood Cancer Story on New SBS Reality Show

Han Do-gon had no framework for what came next. On the premiere of SBS's new dating reality series My Remaining Romance (내 남은 연애), which aired August 3, the cast member read aloud from his illness diary, recounting the moment his cancer diagnosis landed: blank, wordless, and completely without warning.

The show brings together young adults in their 20s and 30s who have received terminal diagnoses or survived serious, life-threatening illnesses. In its first episode, each participant shared their illness diary, turning what might have been an ordinary dating format into something closer to a documentary about survival.

Han Do-gon's entry was striking for its honesty. He described how he had always imagined cancer diagnoses through the lens of film and television, a patient collapsing in tears, demanding to know if they would live, then erupting in anger. When it actually happened to him, none of that came. "I couldn't react at all," he wrote. "It felt like being hit full force while completely defenseless. My mind was nothing but question marks."

What followed was the particular grief of someone who had done everything right. Han Do-gon said he did not smoke, barely drank, exercised every day, and considered himself to be living well. He volunteered. He took care of his health. And yet. "What did I do wrong?" he wrote. "It felt like someone was telling me I had failed. That it was over."

He described walking for a long time after the diagnosis, calling friends and acquaintances rather than going home to an empty apartment. He knew his family would worry more than he did, so he held off on calling them. When people on the phone told him to stay strong, he said he was fine. He was not fine. "I felt wronged. I felt furious," he wrote.

The moment the illness became undeniably real came during treatment, when he felt his hair coming out in his hands while washing it. "Ah. So it's starting. I've become a patient."

Han Do-gon has now completed blood cancer treatment and is two years into remission, having undergone three rounds of chemotherapy and fifteen sessions of radiation. The way he has processed the diagnosis since then is straightforward: cancer, he said, is like a traffic accident. There is no reason. It is not your fault, and it is not anyone else's fault either.

That framing is harder to arrive at than it sounds. My Remaining Romance seems to understand that, and Han Do-gon's diary entry, with its very specific mix of rage, guilt, and eventual acceptance, is the kind of thing that tends to stay with an audience long after an episode ends.