I smiled and mouthed the words Yes, I am. I thought John was going to kill me.
The truth is, I wanted to keep a low profile for my sake too. If this got out, I could just picture the tabloid headline: “The Black Widow Strikes Again!” with my head photoshopped onto the body of a spider.
SURGERY WAS SCHEDULED for after Presidents’ Day weekend. Somehow John had the presence of mind to go to his lawyer beforehand and rewrite his will to include Ellie, Carrie, and me. Such a loving gesture—and yet what it implied was so upsetting. He also made a generous gift to Stand Up To Cancer and the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s research, among other causes. But even in this profoundly mortal moment, there was a little levity: John bequeathed an all-expenses-paid golf trip anywhere in the world to the seven guys he regularly played with.
February 24th, 2014. John’s family, Wendy, and I gathered at the hospital and tried to make small talk. I glanced at a smiling Steve Harvey on the TV mounted to the wall. The minute hand on the clock seemed frozen.
Meanwhile, John was laid out on an operating table being flayed with a scalpel, his skin and muscle peeled back so Dr. Allen could slice his liver in half and remove the tumor （and resect an ulcerated piece of his duodenum）。 If a giant tumor had to take up residence anywhere, the liver was a good place, because it regenerates, like some kind of super-organ. If all went well and it was an isolated mass, John’s liver would miraculously grow back in a matter of months.
“Why is this taking so long?” I must have asked at least 20 times.
Four hours later, a hospital coordinator came up and said the operation had gone well—“They got it all.” But we really wouldn’t know what “it” was until the pathology report came in. Had it spread? Would John need chemo?
As Paula, Wendy, and I were leaving, exhausted from the day, a nurse chased us down with some scary news: John was bleeding internally, a potentially fatal situation. Dr. Allen was on his way home to Chappaqua; by some miracle they reached him just before he got on the Willis Avenue Bridge, where a U-turn would have been impossible.
A major blood vessel had sprung a leak. I panicked, knowing that when patients die, it’s usually in recovery, not on the operating table. Two interminable hours later, Dr. Allen came and told us they had stopped the bleeding.
John recovered on the 16th floor—basically the liver-cancer floor, where so many patients were living out their last days. There was a man in his thirties with bile-duct cancer; he and his wife had two young kids. They reminded me of Jay and me. There were rooms crowded with ultra-Orthodox Jews in their fur-trimmed hats. There were emaciated, ghostlike figures hooked up to IVs walking the halls, going through the motions. The 16th floor of Memorial Sloan Kettering must be one of the saddest places on earth.
A few days in, John was on the move, holding on to his IV pole. He’d do laps around the floor, gingerly at first, increasing the distance every time. The more he walked, the sooner he’d be able to give a positive answer to the standard post-op question posed by nurses multiple times a day: “Have you passed gas?”
“No,” John would reply. “Have you?”
Finally, one night at around 2:00 a.m., he was walking the halls when he emitted a sound he was convinced could be heard all the way to lower Manhattan. “A patient in a nearby room muttered, ‘Show off,’” John joked.
Soon it was like he was training for a 10K—increasing the number of laps, warning other patients that he was passing on the left, greeting his new friend with bile-duct cancer （who looked healthier than he was; he would live only a few more months） with a thumbs-up. One afternoon when John was feeling particularly peppy, Tom and I trailed behind him and his stainless-steel little buddy, the IV pole, belting out a medley of our favorite tunes from West Side Story, The King and I, and Gypsy to cheer him on, hoping that everything was in fact coming up roses.
If there was any question about whether or not John wanted out of the hospital…he started showering and putting on his street clothes each morning and sitting in the chair in his room to greet his medical team. “Hey,” he’d say, “you gotta dress for success.” Once, he actually went to a nearby diner for pancakes. When he came back, the team was waiting for him, Dr. Allen’s arms crossed in mock anger.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Allen told the team, “we’ve got a runner.” John was discharged the next day.
When the pathology report finally came, we had reason to feel optimistic. John had a carcinoid tumor, this one “indolent,” which meant it hadn’t spread. （“Leave it to me to have a lazy tumor,” John said.） But I still needed reassurance. Given my experience, I did not trust cancer in any form. What I did trust, more than just about anything, was the opinion of Mark Pochapin.