The expert who became the patient.
Mathew Peter Silvaggio, MD, has seen major surgery from both sides of the operating table.
For sixteen years he has cared for patients as a physician, guiding people through some of the most vulnerable hours of their lives. Then, at forty-two, the perspective reversed: a routine investigation ended with the words “I think you have cancer.” He was diagnosed with two simultaneous cancers, and everything he understood as a physician he was about to live as a patient.
Rather than wait passively for surgery, he stopped asking “Why me?” and started asking “What can I do about this?” He immersed himself in the evidence on prehabilitation and applied it to his own body and mind — coming to see himself not as a passive participant, but as an active member of his own surgical team.
In September 2025 he underwent an Ivor Lewis esophagectomy, one of surgery's most demanding operations. He was on his feet the next day and discharged home on the fifth.
Built to Recover grew from that experience — the guide he searched for as a patient and couldn't find. It translates the science he knew as a doctor, and lived as a patient, into practical guidance anyone can use to prepare for surgery.
Credentials
- Board-certified physician
- MD, McMaster University
- Residency, University of Ottawa
- 16 years of clinical experience — Trillium Health Partners, Greater Toronto Area
“It was the surgeon's job to get me through the operation with the cancer removed. It was my job to go into surgery with the best possible level of fitness — mentally and physically.” — Mathew Peter Silvaggio, MD, in Built to Recover
He lives in the Greater Toronto Area with his two sons.
