A GUY WITH CANCER WALKS INTO A BAR...

Jablon offers an honest and droll memoir of cancer treatment.

The author, born in Argentina and raised in Venezuela, is the Miami-based head writer of the Music and Entertainment Division of TelevisiaUnivision. In August 2021, at age 52, a persistent cough sent him to an urgent care center, where two masses were found in his lungs. (The masses were the result of a blood cancer called multiple myeloma, not lung cancer, as originally suspected.) At the Miami Cancer Institute, he was treated by an exemplary team of doctors and nurses. Treatment included many scans, multiple rounds of chemotherapy, and a bone marrow transplant. Along the way, there was the very real possibility of his right femur breaking due to damage from multiple myeloma, an unrelated and unusually aggressive thyroid cancer that delayed the bone marrow transplant; he also endured a bout of Covid-19. Throughout the ordeal, Jablon relied on his family, work colleagues, and friends to keep the illness from defining him. His mantra became: “Nowadays, cancer is a chronic condition and not a terminal disease.” The author’s humor, which helped him cope him throughout the process, is reflected in his prose, making this treatment of a difficult subject an enjoyable read. “I was painfully discovering that the medical profession is the toughest audience any comedy writer can face. It was either that or the cancer had already metastasized to my sense of humor.” He writes with empathy about the effect of his suffering on his wife: “Accompanying a sick person is a particularly complicated process…I was having a hard time, but Ilse was not having a better one.” Thoughtful considerations of mortality, his own relationship to religion, insurance and the financial cost of cancer, and some seldom-discussed side effects (“my hair began to fall out, but not the expected ones: my pubic hair, something no one had told me about”) make this a welcome balm not only for those fighting cancer, but for anyone seeking an encouraging perspective on a difficult situation.

Positive, not anodyne.