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The Fear and Hope of Constantly Outliving a Cancer Diagnosis
Life advice from a man who has been facing death for 20 years now
“You can handle more than you think you can.”
— Jonathan Gluck, in An Exercise in Uncertainty
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Jonathan Gluck is two decades into his battle with multiple myeloma, a cancer that gets into the very marrow of bones, making them brittle while simultaneously destroying a person’s immune system and sometimes causing kidney failure. Gluck’s initial prognosis was as grim as they come. Yet thanks to medical advances, and after several serious setbacks in a neverending physical and emotional battle, he recounts the experiences in a new book, An Exercise in Uncertainty: A Memoir of Illness and Hope.
“I’ve been asked if it’s easier to hear you have cancer the second time around,” Gluck writes. “How about the third? The fourth? Do you ever get used to it? You do, in the sense that the news is not flat-out shocking the way it is the first time and you have at least some sense of what lies ahead. But you still feel angry, anxious, and scared. No amount of context or experience ever makes the words ‘You have cancer’ easy to…
