The doctor said that untreatedau777, I could be dead in months.
It began when my phone rang while we were in the whale room at the American Museum of Natural History. My 5-year-old was wowing us with the fact that it would take 70 friends standing hand to hand to make a ring around the life-size blue whale hanging from the ceiling.
I had been expecting the call. Unexplained broken ribs, anomalous blood results and some recent fainting spells suggested that something was wrong. Still, it felt surreal to be told I had an incurable blood cancer, one that I would later find out had ultimately felled my hero, the comedian Norm Macdonald. I felt a youthful 47, walking four miles every morning in the park and always taking the stairs to my eighth-floor apartment. The scene from the film “50/50” came to mind where, upon being told he had cancer, a young man (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) responds incredulously, “That doesn’t make any sense, though. I don’t smoke. I don’t drink. I recycle.”
The hematologist, a warm older doctor, told me that this was not her area of expertise, so she would transfer me to another specialist in her hospital.
The conversation was constantly interrupted by patrolling gangs of kids. She calmly told me it was not curable but was treatable and she hoped I would have many years left and, by the way, I was lucky not to have the cancers in her specialty, since those patients tended to die quickly and painfully. Somehow this did not reassure me.
“Please don’t drop me,” I pleaded. She told me my new doctor would be calling me within an hour and wished me luck. I fled the late afternoon chaos of the museum and sat on a shady bench on that early fall day surrounded by Upper West Side normalcy.
It was 42 minutes before my phone rang again. My list of questions for the new doctor had metastasized from “How long do I have left?” to “Can I still drink soda water?” But the call turned out to be just his harried secretary asking if I was free on Friday of the following week (10 days away) for a meet and greet. I explained that this all seemed rather more urgent. She suggested that in the meantime I could talk to my primary care physician — the same guy who had missed many textbook red flags over the past couple of years and who was now on my never-talk-to-again list of one.
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.au777