Didi helped do the injections, and at first we joked about the whole nurse-fantasy thing. But couples’ injecting turns out to be not that fun.

On the morning of January 26, 2004, Didi and I took a cab to Mount Sinai for the stem-cell harvest. They use a Frankensteinian-looking machine to take the blood out of one arm, remove the stem cells, then pump the remaining blood back into your other arm.

The procedure can cause a drop in your level of calcium, I’d been told, which can make you tingle. What I experienced was more like a fire-ant attack. They started pumping me full of yogurt, but it didn’t really help. I lost the feeling in my feet and couldn’t walk. Eight hours and a half-dozen cups of Dannon lemon flavor later, Didi helped me get into a cab.

My stem cells are sitting in a freezer at Mount Sinai as I write this. My sperm is at NYU. Once in a while, I have the urge to visit everyone.

A NOTE ON THE MTA
By now, I was limping badly and using the cane all the time. I somehow expected that people on the subway would offer me a seat, but almost no one cut me any slack. The city was going to make me fight for my position here, just like it always did. I kind of liked that.

ZAP
I started radiation therapy on February 9, three months and five days after Weiner told me I had cancer.

Several weeks earlier, I’d met with Jack Dalton, a radiation oncologist at Mount Sinai, and he’d laid out my protocol. I’d be radiated five days a week, for five weeks—25 sessions in all. He said that I might be tired, but I shouldn’t be nauseous and I ought to be able to go to work every day. He said that I might have skin burns on the area being radiated and perhaps some lower G.I. issues, but that was about it in terms of short-term side effects. Dr. Dalton also told me that he would build a sort of jury-rigged athletic-cup-type device to try to preserve my fertility, but he couldn’t guarantee it would work. Stray radiation tends to bounce around inside the body.

The radiation treatments themselves were nothing to speak of. You lie down on the table of what looks like a giant X-ray machine. A technician positions you using a system of tattoos and lasers made and mapped out beforehand. Then he swings a large device over you that looks like a TV satellite dish that beams the radiation into you for 30 seconds.

You don’t feel a thing, as they say. It’s so painless, in fact, that I wondered from time to time if I weren’t an unknowing participant in some kind of placebo experiment.

The Mount Sinai radiation unit is in the basement, literally underground. Some of the sickest people I saw anywhere, I saw there. It’s like a ghost network—you realize there’s this whole shadow population of sick people who we shunt out of view. Maybe that’s healthy—maybe it’s too much to stare at the ugly side of life every day. Or maybe we’re callous and afraid.

THE OFFICE
Except for two or three instances when a test or procedure made it impossible, I worked every day during my diagnosis and treatment. People always ask about that for some reason. It’s a cancer cliché: “He didn’t miss a day of work. How brave.” Believe me, it has nothing to do with bravery. In my case, anyway, it had to do with terror. Sit home and contemplate the dimming of the light, or go to work and edit stories about misbehaving politicians or new sushi restaurants. You see my point.

THE TELLTALE VIAL
I met with Dr. Gruenstein on April 8. He told me he wanted to do another protein test, but warned me that it was too early to expect the number to have returned to normal. For now, he wanted to be sure the number hadn’t gone up (a possibility I hadn’t considered). I had the blood drawn that day. I watched the technician carry off the vial. “Make that a good one,” I said.

I CAN SEE CLEARLY NOW
I was born on Saturday, April 17, 1965. On Friday, April 16, 2004, Dr. Gruenstein called to say that my protein level had returned to normal. (Some cancer survivors call this your second birthday, but that term has always seemed a little goofy to me.)

Here’s the thing about cancer. You know there is not a cure, and you know you’re not even considered in-effect cured until you’ve been cancer-free for five years. But when your oncologist calls and tells you that your radiation therapy has worked and that there is “no current evidence of disease” and that this is “the best possible outcome” from the radiation, well, what you do is you start thanking him like a blabbering fool and telling him you owe him your life but that you really need to get off the phone and call your wife, and that you’ll call him back tomorrow to discuss next steps, and then you hang up and let out a little middle-aged white-male whoop of joy—Yes!—right there at your desk, and then you call your wife and tell her the news and she says, “Holy shit! I knew it!” and you tell her that you could feel her confidence all along, and you thank her for being wise enough not to express it until now, and you can practically feel her exhale on the other end of the line, a big, giant cosmic exhale, and she’s the one who first points out that this news has come on the day before your birthday, and she says we’ll have to double celebrate tonight since we were planning on going out for my birthday anyway, and then you hang up and run around your office telling your boss and your boss’s assistant and whoever else is in your lunatic path, that, for the time being anyway, you are going to live and not die, and then you leave work immediately and go to meet your wife for your celebration dinner.

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