I latched onto weird, totemic things. Didi’s mom is a professional pianist, and she had traveled to Beijing to play a concert and brought back a little Buddha. I would rub the top of its head for luck (I was an equal-opportunity religion adopter). Didi bought me a stuffed tiger from a hospital gift shop one day. I carried it in my briefcase every day. Not that I ever believed in it, exactly—but it’s still there.

In November, a few days after I was diagnosed, I went to a Korean deli near my office for lunch. I bought a sandwich, a soda, and a bag of pretzels, and when the woman at the cash register rang me up, the total came to $6.66. She didn’t know I had cancer, of course, but even she thought it was spooky. She immediately punched another one-cent charge into the cash register to change the total to $6.67.

YOU MAY KISS THE BRIDE
Didi and I moved to New York in 1995. We lived in a tiny studio in the Village, where for a time I kept my suitcase in the oven. There were new jobs and neighborhood burrito joints and Lower East Side dive bars. In May 1997, I took Didi to the top of the Empire State Building and proposed. A pair of German tourists were the first to know we were engaged.

That November, we were married in the town where I went to college and Didi had grown up. A month or so before the ceremony, the rabbi had asked us each what we loved most about the other, then she told the congregation what we said. Didi said she loved that I was thoughtful. I said I loved that Didi was real.

SORRY, WRONG CANCER
If you haven’t had cancer, you think, at first, that diagnosing it is like diagnosing any other disease. You take a test and it comes up positive or negative, and you either have the thing or you don’t. But cancer isn’t TB or strep throat. There are thousands of cancers, many of them difficult to identify. You often have to have a constellation of tests, no one of which is conclusive. The doctors gather pieces and put them together until a coherent picture emerges.

My diagnosis took three primary doctors (plus radiologists, imaging and lab technicians, and doctors consulted for second opinions), dozens of tests and retests, and two and a half months. It also changed radically along the way.

Dr. Weiner referred me to a specialist, Patrick Boland, a Sloan-Kettering orthopedic oncologist. Boland said it was encouraging that there were no signs of spreading based on the tests done so far, but added that the only way to know for sure what we were dealing with was to have something called a CT-assisted bone biopsy.

Sloan-Kettering didn’t take my insurance. My choice was, have the procedure done there, the presumptive best facility, and pay a fortune, or have it done somewhere else. I had it done at Lenox Hill. It’s inconceivable to me how anyone without insurance survives cancer.

To perform a bone biopsy, a nurse sets you up with IV sedatives and numbs the area in question with a local anesthetic. Then the doctor inserts a needle through your skin until it hits the bone. At that point, a technician slides you in and out of the CT scanner to see if the needle is at the right spot. Because of the anesthetic, positioning the needle doesn’t hurt much. The removal of the bone tissue is another matter. The anesthetic doesn’t penetrate the bone. The doctor got the piece of tissue she needed and sent it off to the lab.

When I went to see Boland for the results, I ran into him in the hallway, carrying the lab report. He hadn’t read it yet, so he opened it on the spot.

The relevant language read “Suspect a plasma cell neoplasm.”

I asked what that was, and Boland explained that it was a form of bone-marrow cancer, not bone cancer. It might be isolated to this spot, in which case it would be classified as something called a solitary plasma cytoma, or it might be the first manifestation so far of something called multiple myeloma.

Multiple myeloma is incurable, he said, while a solitary plasma cytoma can sometimes be treated successfully. The catch, he explained, is that a solitary plasma cytoma often turns into multiple myeloma.

MY OLDEST FRIEND
I’m the youngest of four children. We like to tease my mother about being protective of her kids, and my father for being preternaturally calm. My sister Jen is a savant of a listener and empathizer. Tina hurts for you when something hurts. My brother, Andy, is a legitimate candidate for World’s Most Optimistic Human. I can tell you, those qualities prove useful when you call your family and tell them you have cancer.

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