Fred Swaab used to love gliding along the slippery surface at Bondi Icebergs. A competitive swimmer and lifetime member of the iconic pool’s winter swim club, Fred used to train there every morning.

It was a welcome pause from the pressures of running a successful Sydney law firm.

“I always worked until about 7pm at night, starting at about 7am or 8am in the morning, and I always worked all of Saturday,” recalls the 64-year-old chairman of Swaab Attorneys.

As a managing partner, who was also building his practice, that was life for Fred for 20 years.

“He’s a fairly driven sort of guy; the Saturdays in the office were kind of his trade mark,” says Bronwyn Pott, Swaab’s CEO.

A deadly diagnosis

In late October 2010, Fred was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. The cancer, which often strikes young children but peaks in incidence after age 45, is characterised by immature cells that continuously multiply, crowd out normal cells in the bone marrow and can spread to other organs.

Fred had little warning. Competing in the 2010 national championships for the Winter Swimming Association of Australia, he performed well in the heats, but could not back up for the finals. Shortly afterwards, on a business trip to Korea in October, he felt suddenly weak and had a rapid heart rate.

Doctors were surprised to find very low blood counts in Fred. A haematologist was brought in and determined the prognosis was not good.

“It was information overload,” recalls Fred.

An expert in advising corporations on the laws around large-scale transactions, Fred tried to sit back and think pragmatically.

He would have to undergo high doses of chemotherapy and lumbar punctures and the long-term outcome would only be determined if he could have a successful bone marrow stem-cell transplant from a third party.

The chance of finding a third-party donor was a one in 10,000.

“It wasn’t a case of breaking down and crying, it was more a case of being totally confused and worrying how I was going to cope and worrying about my family’s reaction,” he says.

He called Bronwyn, who was just about to give a speech to welcome a new partner to the firm.

“I had to go and give that and hold it together,” she says.

Jewish connection

Weeks later, David, a rare, genetically perfect 8/8 match for Fred, was found listed on US donor registry The Gift of Life.

Dedicated to recruitment within the Jewish community, The Gift of Life was the first donor registry to utilise cheek swabs to test donors on a large scale at donor recruitment drives.

Just a few months before Fred’s transplant manager began the search, David, a 21-year-old medical student living in Baltimore, had agreed to give his specimen at a drive.

“I was immediately elated, everyone was elated, but I was worried that maybe this guy wouldn’t want to go ahead with the procedure,” says Fred.

David would have to endure months of medical tests, growth hormone injections to increase his blood stem cell count and a painful blood transfusion that would immobilise his arms for days.

“The reason he did it, [David] says, was because he thought it would look good on his CV because he’s doing pre-medicine … but obviously that wasn’t his main reason,” says Fred.

Two months into chemotherapy, Fred was losing hair and weight and cortisone steroids were disturbing his sleep patterns and day-time vision.

Bronwyn was making weekly visits to talk business and generally keep him in the loop, but high doses of steroids affected Fred’s behaviour.

“Just imagine someone with a heap of testosterone running through them … I’d send out cautionary notes warning that 'super charged hyper' Fred was on board today because he’s likely to take a verbal swipe at somebody,” says Bronwyn.

Fred had never missed a Swaab Christmas party before his illness. Determined to make an appearance, he recorded a video of himself belting out Justin Bieber’s Never Say Never to remind staff that he was still thinking of them and “still on their wavelength” he says.

“He was absolutely high as a kite when it was filmed … very much on the drugs and really sort of halfway through forgetting what he’s doing,” says Bronwyn, who agreed to play the tape after staff had consumed plenty of alcohol on the night.

“People were laughing and crying and it was really very sweet.”

A week before the transplant, Fred was given high doses of chemotherapy to enable him to take in the new blood product.

“I was fully cleaned out and fully wrecked by the process and then the foundation sent over [David’s] blood product by air courier and the next morning they tested it and then gave it to me,” he says.

David’s stem cells - 400 million of them - were infused into Fred in March 2011.

Taking care of business

During all this, Fred urged the partners at Swaab to “keep the email CCs coming”.

“[It’s] comforting and keeps me grounded,” he wrote in an online blog.

Bed-bound with his BlackBerry, he sent messages to concerned clients that he had a positive mindset and the best thing they could do was to drum up work for the firm.

As his new baby stem cells matured, he began riding an exercise bicycle in a St Vincent’s Hospital ward and, soon enough, was able to return to work part-time.

“We had a little Indian summer there … then a couple of months later he got graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) and was really very ill. That was the hardest part,” says Bronwyn.

Fred had a natural generosity with his clients, says Bronwyn, and the firm had to scramble for some that “fell through the cracks” in his absence.

Fred and Bronwyn had been working on a firm succession plan for more than a decade. When two home-grown senior associates left in 2000, they re-designed the firm to try and attract top talent.

“We didn’t have another five years to experiment again because if it didn’t come off the second time we’d be absolutely screwed,” says Bronwyn.

“We managed to get a few young partners who bought the dream and that really helped during Fred’s time out of the office because they were the ones who stepped up.”

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Sheer determination

Fred was recovering from his GVHD when, en-route to the bathroom, he fell, breaking multiple ribs that punctured his organs. Emergency thoracic surgery kept him alive and he built up his strength enough to go home again.

“Sometimes he could only crawl and it was heartbreaking, but his determination to get from one room to another, or to demonstrate how he could use the elliptical bike, even if he could only do one more step each day, was totally inspirational,” says Bronwyn.

“He was just starting to recover at home; he went to get out of bed and his diaphragm tore in half and so, again, back to hospital, emergency surgery … it was like ‘what else can happen?’”

Despite the ordeal, Fred performed the Moves like Jagger for another staff Christmas party video in 2011.

By late last year, he was back at work three days a week and attended the 2012 Christmas party in person.

“I gave a little talk to everyone, as I do every year, and then I did Gangnam Style,” Fred says, smiling confidently.

There could be no blaming it on drugs that time; Fred always made an effort to engage with younger people in the firm and always put a lot of thought into what he did, says Bronwyn.

“He’s just a terrific human being but he doesn’t take himself too seriously,” she says.

A second chance

Recent blood tests show Fred has the blood of a person who never had leukaemia.

Earlier this year he travelled to New York to thank the young man that saved his life.

“There was a degree of anxiety and it was obviously a very emotional opportunity. Although he’s a genetically perfect match with me, he’s a much shorter person, much younger, doesn’t look like me and he’s completely different.”

“The door opened and there they were, his whole family, and I bought my [family] in, and we sort of all embraced,” says Fred, adding that they talked about what the transplant meant, where Fred had come from and how it had changed his life.

“I’m more relaxed now than I ever was. I’ve taken the view that I’ve got to be more controlled in the way in which I do my work and control my life, whereas, as a busy lawyer, often your life’s not your own.”

Fred now works five hours a day, five days a week and focuses solely on client development and marketing.

He swims at the Icebergs only on Sundays now, and not quite so fast, but he does have an excuse.

“[David] doesn’t swim very fast so, because I’ve in fact got his blood running through my veins … I’m no longer swimming as [fast as] I was.”