SURVIVING UNCERTAINTY

When you live with a recurring and potentially deadly cancer for 20 years, you learn a few things about how to keep perpetual uncertainty from taking you down.

- JONATHAN GLUCK

IT WAS ONE of those lousy late-fall New York evenings, cold and dark and sort of half raining and half sleeting. I walked out of my office and slipped on a patch of ice. It wasn't much of a slip. I just twisted my left hip, then caught my balance. I went on my way. The next morning, my hip hurt. I've had my share of sports injuries over the years, and it felt like that—a torn ligament, maybe. Then a few weeks went by and then another few weeks, and it still hurt. I went to see my orthopedist. He took some X-rays but didn't see anything wrong.

My hip kept hurting, but I was too busy to see a doctor. I was 38, at my dream job, and the first-time father of a 7-month-old baby girl. A sore hip just didn't seem that important.

By the following November, though, my hip hurt all the time, and my doctor sent me for an MRI. A few days later, I went to his office to discuss the results. He closed the door, sat directly across from me, and fixed me with a professional gaze.

“I’ve got the results of your MRI,” he said. “There is a lesion on your hip.”

“A lesion?” I said. “You mean a tumor?”

“Yes,” he said.

And with that single syllable, I had cancer.

At the time I was diagnosed with what turned out to be an incurable form of blood cancer called multiple myeloma, I was told I had 18 months to live. Thanks to revolutionary new treatments for my illness that have been developed since then, that was more than 20 years ago. In the intervening years, I have been in and out of remission many times, but in each case, my doctors have managed to knock back my disease. It is not a stretch to say I am a medical miracle.