Jon Gluck with his wife, Didi, and daughter, Abby.   (Photo: Jason Schmidt)

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 sports injuries over the years, and it felt like that—a torn ligament, maybe. I figured I’d rest it and it would go away. Then a few weeks went by and then another few weeks, and it still hurt. In January, I went to see my orthopedist. He took X-rays but didn’t see anything wrong.

My hip kept hurting, but I was too busy to see a doctor. A few months earlier, my wife, Didi, and I had bought our first apartment, and we were still getting settled there. In February, I left the start-up magazine I’d been working on to take a job here at New York. And in April, we had our daughter, Abby. I was 37 years old and healthy. A sore hip didn’t seem that important.

By November 2003, though, my hip hurt all the time. I couldn’t run, and it was getting hard to pick up Abby. It’s been a year since I did this, I remember thinking. It’s not going away on its own. I went back to the orthopedist. He ordered an MRI.

I remember worrying about getting claustrophobic in the machine—that was what I considered a major medical issue. But after I got the MRI, I basically forgot about it. I figured, worst case, the orthopedist, whose name is Lon Weiner, would tell me I needed some minor surgery. A day or two went by, and I got a call at work: “Dr. Weiner wants to see you. He’s got your MRI results.”

This is how naïve I was: I thought, Wow, that’s great. This guy is calling me with my test results before I even have a chance to call him.

On November 4, five days after the MRI, I went back to Weiner’s office. They took me straight to an examining room.

One of the things about growing up in the age of TV is that we’ve seen all of the big acts of the human drama—weddings, births, deaths—played out before we’ve experienced them. What happened next had an eerie feeling of familiarity about it.

Dr. Weiner came in and closed the door. He told me to sit down. He sat directly across from me, fixed me with a professional gaze, and said, “I’ve got the results of your MRI. There is a lesion on your hip.”

Only this wasn’t an ER episode. And Weiner’s voice, dispassionate as he tried to make it, contained an unmistakable trace of actual human horror.

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

“Yes,” he said.

And just like that, I had cancer.

"NO.”
I used to think of denial as a pop-psych cliché. Not anymore. The first thing I said to Dr. Weiner was, “No. No, no, no, no. This isn’t possible. I’m 37 years old. I feel fine.” And then: “I have a 7-month-old daughter. This cannot be true.”

The tumor was nine centimeters by seven centimeters by four centimeters, Weiner told me. Good, I thought. Centimeters. Small. A moment later, he called it “large.”

From the evidence at hand, the radiologist speculated that I had something called a chondrosarcoma—bone cancer. He made a point of saying that the tumor could also be a secondary tumor related to a primary, not yet detected cancer.

I started tossing out crackpot theories and terms I don’t really know the meaning of. The slip on the ice—could this be some kind of calcification or bone spur? Weiner said it wasn’t likely.

The tumor was in a tricky spot, he said. It was in the socket part of the ball-and-socket joint that is your hip. He said I’d probably need chemotherapy, and surgery to remove a large part of my pelvic bone. The best case, he said, was that he could fuse my hip afterward, using a cadaver bone, and create a sort of peg leg. The other possibility, something he implied but was kind enough not to share with me at the time, was that he’d have to amputate my left leg. His euphemism for the time being was that I might be looking at “a much more extensive disability.”

THE 6 TRAIN
Weiner’s office is on the twelfth floor of Lenox Hill Hospital, overlooking East 77th Street. Across the way, there were grade-school kids playing on a rooftop playground. I remember watching them and thinking, My daughter will never know her father. What evolutionary purpose self-pity serves at moments like this I can’t tell you.

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