My nuts ached on Sunset Boulevard. That sounds like the first line of a Raymond Chandler potboiler—or perhaps Warren Beatty’s autobiography—but this was happening to me. It was the summer of 2000. The Democratic National Convention was in Los Angeles, and I was covering it for the New York Observer. At the moment I was sitting in Mel’s Drive-In on Sunset Boulevard eating a chicken club sandwich, and every so often my, uh, junk would begin aching like hell. There’s no graceful way of explaining this, so I’ll just say this: I couldn’t differentiate whether it was one ball or two balls or, you know, the whole deal. It was an occasional and overarching junk hurt, as if someone had taken a steel-toed boot to my crotch and then slammed it in a garage door.
The first thing you do when you feel pain in that region is to ignore it as long as possible. This is idiotic, of course, perhaps life-threatening. Then you begin doing inventory on all the possible causes. Did someone kick me in the balls recently? No. Did someone punch me in the balls recently? No. Did someone take a 30 kg Russian kettlebell, climb to the top of a twelve-story building, and drop it on my nether parts? I do not believe so. Trying to self-diagnose through the Internet was terrifying. I grimaced reading about “torsion of the testes,” a condition in which your spermatic cord is twisted as if you’ve asked your balls for fresh pepper.
By the time I got back to New York, the pain was dull and constant. I went to the doctor and the doctor did the proper doctor thing. He said it was “probably no big deal,” but just to be sure, he was going to send me to a urologist.
The urologist was matter-of-fact. It was indeed something of a deal. “Seminoma of the left testicle,” he said bloodlessly. “I’d like to schedule you for a procedure by the end of the week.”
The “procedure” meant that he was going to cut an incision in my groin, reach in, and remove my left testicle, as if he were pulling a piece of Halloween candy from a purse. My reaction to this was something between horrified and incredulous, as if I’d been told a basset hound had just been elected president of the United States. I will spare you the part about how I freaked out and called everyone I knew for a doctor recommendation, and how I got a second opinion and the second opinion was exactly the same as the first. I was a classic case: right age, right symptoms, left nut. I’d been lucky enough to detect it early; it had not advanced.
If I acted now, everything would be fine. Highly curable, I was told. On the order of 96 percent. Maybe even higher. Close to 100. The news was presented like a winning scratch ticket: if you’re going to get a cancer, this is the cancer to get! But even that 2 to 4 percent sits you up in bed and winks at you like a gremlin. If you tell somebody he has between a 2 and a 4 percent chance that day of being struck by a bus, he might never want to cross the street.
But it cannot be delayed; it’s something you need to do. The surgery was set. I soft-pedaled the diagnosis to the handful of people I told, talking about it as if I’d turned my ankle in a pickup basketball game. I told Leslie, my girlfriend at the time, that it wasn’t important for her to come down from Boston (where she lived) to New York (Leslie came anyway, because she was a good person). My boss at the Observer, Peter Kaplan, called me on the phone, sounding, as he often did, like he was talking beneath an airplane that had just turned on its propellers.
“JASON!” Peter said. “I KNOW somebody who went through this. The EXACT SAME THING. You’re a YOUNG guy. You’re going to be fine. FINE. OKAY.”
I was anxious about telling my parents. It’s the kind of call parents dread. No matter what you say to alleviate the worry, no matter how many times you repeat “highly curable” and “full and fast recovery,” they are your parents, your mom and dad. I pleaded that they didn’t have to be there, that this wasn’t a big deal, that I’d be up and at it very soon. And of course it didn’t calm my parents down, because there’s no way it can calm your parents down. In the time I was explaining myself, I think I heard my father drop the phone and drive himself and my mother 215 miles to New York, which I now realize is exactly what I would have done.
In the wait for the surgery, I would loiter in the Barnes & Noble near my apartment and thumb through the only book I knew about testicular cancer: It’s Not About the Bike, by Lance Armstrong. I also celebrated my birthday. Let me tell you something about having your birthday right after a cancer diagnosis: people really show up. It was perfect attendance, on time and everything. We went out for burritos and margaritas and ignored the only thing on everyone’s mind.
Meanwhile, I banked sperm. I’m just going to assume you’ve never banked sperm, so allow me to describe what it is like. Imagine the most erotic dream you’ve ever had in your life—I mean the really hot stuff. Now imagine the opposite of that. Banking sperm is like having an erotic liaison with yourself at 9:30 A.M. in a barren hospital Dumpster. Somebody hands you a sterile cup and sends you to a little office that looks like the room you might be detained in if airport customs found hash in your shoe. There is one chair, which you are frightened to sit in. In the corner is a small combination TV/VCR which you would have been pretty psyched about if your parents had given it to you for Christmas in 1983. There are VHS tapes with gag titles: I’m not sure there was a movie called Around the World in 80 Lays, but that kind of thing. There is a basket filled with wrinkled magazines you should not touch with tongs. They had Juggs. A lot of Juggs.
And in this desultory environment you are expected to have a tender moment with yourself and produce a sample, which will be frozen in a refrigerator at a rate of $400 a year. You have to sign paperwork indicating your consent and whom you would allow to take the sample in the event of your death. It is not advisable to sign it over to your mother, not unless you want your surviving family to end up on an episode of Maury.
The morning of the surgery I went to my friend Ali’s and walked crosstown with her to the hospital. These were my final moments with two balls, and I wanted them both to walk the town, feel connected to the concrete, like Jimmy Carter at his inauguration. It was that time between summer and fall when New York is glowing and perfect, the way it is in Kate Hudson movies you half watch before falling asleep on an airplane.
The operation took less than an hour. It was pronounced a success. They confirmed that I had a malignancy, news that produced in me a weird reaction: Good! I mean, bad? (If you go through the ordeal, you want to kind of have the ordeal, no?)
A few weeks later I began radiation treatment, which involved going to visit a cancer center in Manhattan’s West Village—a giant, sleek building that looked like a car wash for the Millennium Falcon. There I’d sit up on a slab in a sterile room and they’d close a big steel door behind me and zap my lower body. In the moment it doesn’t feel like anything. But shortly afterward your guts begin to roil.
And you fear you might puke. And you do puke.
I’d spend the afternoons at Ali’s apartment, which was close to the cancer center, sleeping in her guest room, puking in her guest bathroom (sorry, Ali). I was warned about going back to work too quickly, so of course I went back to work too quickly. I lost a lot of weight and didn’t fit in my clothes. The first time I went to interview a subject for a story—the interview was at a W Hotel on the East Side—I ran straight to the men’s room as soon as I got there and barfed my guts out. I spent the interview terrified that I smelled like puke, and as soon as it was over I was back in the bathroom, barfing again.
I wish I could say the experience instantly transformed me. I wish I could say there was an epiphany or a euphoric moment in that stall at the W Hotel in which I vowed I was going to change everything about my life. Nothing like that happened. My friend Mary, who’d been through cancer, said that you know you are on the other side of it when the stupid crap you used to get mad about before you got sick gets you mad again. Inane, petty things, like somebody not refilling the coffee in the break room at the office. Sweating the small stuff may be super-unhealthy for healthy people, but to a sick person it feels like a release, a return to normalcy, the healthiest thing imaginable. I hated thinking about the Big Picture all the time. I wanted to curse idiots in traffic. I wanted to be completely annoyed when the supermarket was out of Honey Bunches of Oats.
I spent a long time worried that I’d get sick again. If I sat still for more than ten minutes, I’d feel these phantom aches down there and think it was back again, ruthlessly charging after me for the second testicle. To this day I want no part of a hospital. When my kids were born, I was a basket case; my wife wanted to throw me out of the room like a nightclub bouncer. Shortly after our daughter Josie arrived, she got a nasty cold that turned into a respiratory problem; we spent seven nights in the ICU and I practically had to commit myself to an asylum. Everything turned out fine, but I freak out if a doctor closes a door. I know what a closed door can mean.
But the more and more I am away from it, the more I forget it ever happened. I honestly do. I go weeks and sometimes months not ever thinking about it. I don’t feel special, spared, a survivor—if anything, I feel strange about calling myself a survivor, because I had it easy. The odds were my friend. I’m not even in the ballpark of someone who suffered. I don’t feel a part of the club. I just feel like myself.
It is all anyone could really ask.
When Dad got sick, it was serious right away. He’d been having problems eating for a while; we’d gone on a family vacation in the Bahamas over Christmas—my parents; my brother, Chris, and his daughter, Blue; Bessie, Jesse, and I—and at dinner he ordered the same thing every night (plain pasta with vegetables), which I just chalked up to some bizarre old-guy behavior, like the chunky black sneakers he wore that made him look like a chimneysweep. In February, Dad finally got to the doctor—dads do doctors on their own time; a severed hand might get them to wander into an ER after thirty-six hours—and at first the doctor thought it was a kind of acid reflux. He was given a fistful of pills and sent home. The pain worsened. My mother began sending cryptic texts about “big tests” and making sure to pray. (Such pleas were not unusual; my churchgoing mother prayed for the Patriots to beat the Jets.) In early March the hammer fell: pancreatic cancer.
You probably know that pancreatic cancer is not a terribly curable form of cancer. It’s actually a terribly incurable form of cancer. It’s one of those diagnoses you tell people and they suddenly hush, because the assumption is that the diagnosed might have weeks or months, not years. There are exceptions—survival stories, whispers of advanced techniques and trials. The exceptions provide a useful life raft, but the doctors don’t try to hide it: hard days are ahead.
Dad wanted to fight. Of course he did. My dad had grown up without much and he’d gotten an engineering degree and become a teacher and a high school tennis coach and he’d always maintained a mildly ornery, combative streak—he didn’t put up with crap, or take crap, and he could be formidable in an argument (sometimes on car trips I’d listen to my father argue with whatever cuckoo talk radio program he was listening to, as if the radio host were inside the car, taking notes). He’d raised his children in the gentle suburbs, but he thought of himself as a city kid who wasn’t afraid of concrete or conflict, who didn’t back down, ever.
He would not back down here. Everybody wants to fight, especially at the start. It’s the normal human reaction when pushed into a corner. You are going to be an exception. You’re going to turn the odds upside down. There were scans to be done, and Dad needed to be fitted for a chemotherapy port, and from the looks of it he had already lost a bunch of weight, but he was going to beat it. We gathered in Dad’s hospital room in Cambridge, not far from where he’d grown up, and it felt like a locker room in the minutes before a prizefight. He talked confidently and we talked confidently around him. He was going to get on the other side of this thing.
In the car home, we told each other the truth.
We had no idea.
That’s not true: we had an idea, but we found it helpful to suppress it in favor of something more forward and positive. My mother, who would be at his side for the duration, saw the harshness of his decline but remained a beacon of optimism. Updates were presented with unbridled hope. Daddy got the port installed today. Daddy just had his second chemo. Daddy is really ready to fight. My mother, a city kid herself, who grew up not far from Dad, was a warrior. Between the two of them, maybe Dad could get on the other side of this thing.
But he was getting worse. I’d make plans to visit and have a bag packed, and he’d call moments before I left and ask me not to come. Well, he’d tell me not to come. He claimed he was worried I’d bring germs up—I had a kid; my house was a germ factory, he said—but there was more to it. At night we’d put Dad on the iPhone FaceTime with Jesse, and you could see that he was vanishing. By mid-April he was down fifty pounds. By late May it was closer to seventy. In two months he had lost more than a third of himself.
I stopped asking for his permission to visit. I just showed up, marched into the kitchen and through the living room to find him in the den. His hair had been slow to fall out—he had that going for him—but he was shrinking down to his bones. In the kitchen my mother pulled me aside and asked me how he looked. I see him every day, she said. I don’t know. I’d tell her something between what she wanted to hear and what she needed to hear. I said he looked bad but seemed to be hanging in okay. Then I’d call my brother and tell him I’d seen a ghost.
There were times when he’d talk a little and times when he didn’t want to talk at all. He mostly sat in front of the TV and faded in and out. The Red Sox were in the midst of a terrible season, and he watched every Red Sox game. That’s how sick he was. He’d never been a loyal viewer of a sitcom in his life, but he developed an affection for The Big Bang Theory. The geek in him liked the inside math and science jokes. Sometimes in the darkness he’d be watching The Big Bang Theory and he would let out a huge laugh that sounded more like a pained howl. At first those howls scared me, but I grew to love them. They reassured me that there was still something fierce inside.
His weight became a crisis. He was on a strong trial form of chemotherapy designed to shrink his tumor and make him a candidate for radiation and surgery. But it was wrecking his ability to keep anything inside. He grew terrified to eat, fearful of vomiting and diarrhea. Chris ordered crates of high-calorie drinks sent to the house. They were the worst thing you ever tasted, kind of like cream of chalk chowder, but if Dad could keep them down…
He couldn’t keep them down. Or he ignored them altogether. It drove my brother crazy, but mostly it made us all so sad.
In early June he went to visit the doctor for a checkup, and when they got a look at him, they rushed him straight to intensive care. The cancer center at Massachusetts General Hospital was a shiny cathedral of glass and steel. Dad had a room with a zillion-dollar view of Beacon Hill and the golden dome of the statehouse. He never looked.
My brother and I began to talk about days left.
At the hospital they decided to feed him intravenously, which helped. If nothing else, he wasn’t losing weight. But chemo was ruled out for the time being. His body couldn’t take any more of it, at least not at the moment. It was crushing him.
He had to gain weight, or he didn’t stand a chance. My brother tried to rally everyone to be Dad’s weight-gain team. Chris elegantly called it “Team Not Fucking Around.” He bought this pancake mix that would help Dad make pancakes with as many calories as a whole lasagna. Dad swore he would drink the cream of chalk soup. We looked into buying him pot. (You really learn who the potheads in your life are when a loved one has cancer. People were lining up to give us the phone number for their pot guys.) No suggestion was off the table.
I was due at the World Cup for work in a couple of days. I didn’t want to go. Chris, a soccer nut, thought I was crazy.
I thought Dad would die while I was gone.
I flew back to New York in the morning and turned around to Brazil in the afternoon. As the World Cup began, I felt this unsettling combination of excitement and total detachment. The games were these brilliant bursts of energy and life, but I was consumed by what was going on back home.
Then the strangest thing happened: Dad began mildly to bounce back. Halting chemotherapy threw the ravaging of his body into reverse. The intravenous nutrition stabilized him. He put on weight. Then there was the Ritalin the doctors prescribed to give him a boost, and did it give him a boost. Soon Dad was calling me in Brazil three times a day. Three times an hour. Early in the morning. Midafternoon. Middle of the night.
He’d said maybe a hundred words to me in the past two months. Suddenly he was a seventh grader on his way to a school dance.
What’s going on?
How is Brazil?
Where are you now?
What are you doing?
What are you doing?
What are you doing?
You know that scene in E.T. when everyone thinks E.T. is a goner and Elliott says his goodbye and suddenly the alien springs to life and starts yapping nonstop? It was like that. Dad sounded like Dad again. In early July, Mom sent a photo text message: she’d taken Dad out to dinner at a restaurant by the water. A couple weeks before, Dad hadn’t been able to go for a walk around the block. He didn’t want to go in the yard, get in a car, even come downstairs sometimes. Now I was looking at a photo of him sitting at the bar—the bar!—of a restaurant, digging into shrimp cocktail.
It felt like a rally, like he was getting a chance. Not long after coming back from Brazil, I went to Boston for his doctor’s appointment, and the mood was almost festive. Dad had gained close to 10 pounds. We gushed over his new enthusiasm, energy, his interest in the world around him. He was having better days.
The doctors warned that they’d done nothing to halt the cancer—they’d just stopped the treatments that had been ripping him apart. The bounce was real, but that’s all it was: a bounce. Gravity would soon pull him back toward earth. He needed to think about chemo again. He needed to get back on a regimen. Grim things lurked around the corner.
But it was hard to see the life that had returned to Dad’s eyes and want to put him back in that hole again. The choice was left to him. After a brief consideration in the doctor’s office, Dad said he was going to take the rest of the summer off. The mood was different than it had been a few months before, when it had felt like a prizefight. Dad was going to chill. He was going to see how it went. He was going to try and live a little.
It was all anyone could really ask.