Jack rushed us to East 72nd Street. Jay winced from the stabbing pain as he was led into Dr. Nash’s examination room. I lingered in the waiting area, too sick with nerves to even leaf through a gummy copy of Men’s Health, whose name and buff cover model seemed to mock our situation. In his office afterward, Dr. Nash tried to keep us calm but couldn’t hide his concern, sending us immediately to New York Hospital. There, Jay handed me a piece of paper on which he’d written the names and phone numbers of our insurance broker and the lawyer who’d drafted our will.
He was admitted right away. That’s when our nightmare officially began.
I WALKED INTO THE apartment and hugged the girls—Ellie was 5, Carrie 15 months. I quickly packed a bag for Jay, threw on a pair of jeans, and headed back to the hospital.
I was greeted in the hallway by a young gastroenterologist named Mark Pochapin. Displaying a bedside manner I would rely on for months, even years, to come, he gave me his assessment.
“Your husband has a tumor the size of an orange that is completely blocking his colon,” he said. “He needs a bowel resection so we can remove it before we even begin to discuss what kind of treatment is possible.”
The words swirled around me—normally an acute listener, quick with a follow-up, I couldn’t focus. Until he added: “We believe it’s cancer.”
Cancer.
A sucker punch to my gut.
Cancer? Handsome, athletic, 41-year-old Jay? This couldn’t be happening. My future flashed before my eyes: Christmases, birthday parties, graduations, weddings—all of it suddenly replaced by uncertainty.
Cancer was supposed to happen to older people—pancreatic for my great-uncle Leon, ovarian for my mother-in-law, Carol, undergoing treatment as her son was being diagnosed. Growing up, I thought it only happened to characters in movies and TV shows, like Carol Brady’s phantom first husband, who （I assumed） had died of it before she met Mike, or Love Story’s Jenny Cavilleri, who made succumbing to a fatal illness look so, well, beautiful. Or My Life, in which the terminally ill character played by Michael Keaton reconciles with his father and makes a heartbreaking video for his future son.
When I saw that movie, my own bad news was years away, and yet it gutted me, exposing my greatest fear—losing someone I loved.
Now, my life was that movie. But I couldn’t simply wipe my eyes, pitch my popcorn bucket in the trash, and head home. This was about as real as it gets. Cancer, it turned out, happened to people like us.
THEY RUSHED JAY INTO emergency surgery, which involved excising the tumor, then reconnecting the two pieces of his large intestine. The smell of disinfectant, the fluorescent lights, the beige vinyl chairs, the loudspeaker paging a doctor, the sad, leftover flowers at the nurses’ station—this would become my new normal.
I walked across York Avenue in a thick haze, barely capable of operating my limbs. I’d heard a horrible story about a bereft man who’d left the same hospital after learning his wife was dying of cancer. As he crossed the street, he was struck by a car and killed. Tragic, ironic—and now completely conceivable to me. Jay’s sister Clare came and slept on the pullout couch in the den; I was so restless and upset, I joined her. We held hands through the night. I mentioned how dry hers were, which, for a brief moment, made us laugh.
I thought about all the clues I’d overlooked. The fact that Jay had a perpetually sensitive, sour stomach. He popped Tums like cocktail peanuts; I remember discovering a roll of them in his pocket on our first date. He’d even stopped drinking coffee, hoping it was the caffeine that was causing his stomach to declare war on itself.
Jay was also tired a lot. But we had two little girls and he traveled frequently, most recently to Denver to cover the run-up to the Oklahoma City bombers’ trial for MSNBC, where he’d become a legal analyst. Who wouldn’t be tired? And, yes, he was steadily losing weight—but like most neurotic New Yorkers, we were always trying to drop a few pounds.
Why hadn’t I given any of this a second thought? Why hadn’t I noticed that Jay’s pants had grown baggy and that his skin seemed slightly jaundiced? If I’d just pressed pause long enough to look at him, really look at him…we were too busy living to see that he was dying.
I had woken up that morning with a healthy husband, our lives stretching out before us. I went to sleep with a husband who had colon cancer and a colostomy bag.
31
Mr. Katie Couric
I HADN’T BEEN ATTENTIVE enough. That stung, especially at this moment in our marriage. I never discussed it with anyone except a complete stranger—a guest on the show who had written a book on intimacy. After our interview, I approached her in the hallway and asked quietly, “My husband and I haven’t been intimate in a while…is this something I should be worried about?”