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Guest Essay

By David C. Roberts

Mr. Roberts is a writer and filmmaker living in New York City.

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........

© The New York Times