The doctor said that untreated, 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.
And then there was no one on the line.
In “Anna Karenina,” when Levin’s brother Nikolai is dying in agonizing pain, Levin is so physically and psychologically repulsed that he avoids the situation and dreads the mental anguish it brings. By contrast, Levin’s young wife, Kitty, views Nikolai with compassion and cares for him with tenderness and dignity. Her calm acceptance allows her to face the grimness of death with grace.
I have generally been private about my affairs, my time as a diplomat just amplifying that reflex. I guess my cynical self believed the world to be full of Levins. But I needed a doctor, so I stayed on that bench and contacted everyone I could think of who might help me find the right one — friends, some folks I hadn’t spoken to in years, ex-colleagues, a high school girlfriend, a former potential subject for a documentary and so on.
Within hours, even friends of friends were sending emails on my behalf to myeloma experts across the country. In the end, a doctor saw me and delivered my prognosis: With treatment, I might just make it to a cure, maybe 10 years away. But in hindsight, it was not just a doctor I was looking for but something more important.
Since that day, so many people have shown up as Kittys rather than the Levins I had expected. Had I been hit by a bus instead, I would have not only missed seeing people at their best but also been robbed of the chance to feel this gratitude — as hokey as it sounds — for having been allowed this existence in the first place.
A few days after learning I had cancer, a dear friend of mine with his own health problems drove from hours away to show up at our door lugging two huge bags of the very finest from his favorite Italian restaurant. “When a friend is in trouble, you circle the wagons,” he said. I was reminded of when Lou Gehrig, facing a devastating diagnosis, called himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
I am not writing here to provide advice to you, dear reader, but I do appreciate your company. Knowing that you are an audience of many rather than a few is a strong motivator to organize my thoughts and, now, to leave this as a record for my boy.
Before my diagnosis, if I was going to give him one bit of advice, it would have been, “Never miss an opportunity to be generous; they are rarer than you think.” I wish I had lived that more. But today I’d like to add a corollary, “Don’t be afraid to allow others those opportunities, too.”
Maybe it’s the steroids talking, but what has become clear to me is that without intimate human connection, however fleeting, we are lost. Everything else seems so small by comparison. It feels like something I had always known — perhaps something that deep down we all know — but then real life made me forget.
And through all this, real life has had the indecency to keep on doing what it does. Before cancer split my world into Kittys and Levins, there had always been a few plain old jerks to deal with, and unfortunately, they didn’t go away. I’ll take a pass on those human connections.
But the bell tolls for us all, and in those rare moments when we truly hear it, life’s complexities can fade, leaving behind a striking clarity.
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