The strange, satisfying power of completely losing your sh*t
Or, how I almost punched out a perfect stranger in the middle of a busy Manhattan street while I was undergoing chemotherapy—and liked it
Before I get into how I lost my mind, jumped out of a cab in the middle of Park Avenue South in Manhattan, and almost punched a perfect stranger after finishing my second round of chemotherapy in a month in preparation for a risky, futuristic immunotherapy treatment for the incurable form of blood cancer I have, let me give you the quick backstory.
In the fall of 2002, I slipped on the ice leaving my office one night. My hip hurt for a year afterward, but mostly I ignored it. I thought it was an orthopedic issue that would go away on its own.
But a year later, when the pain hadn’t abated, I saw my doctor, who ordered an MRI. When I went to his office to discuss the results, he told me I had a lesion on my hip.
I was 38 years old, pursuing a promising career in journalism, married to a woman I loved, and the first-time father of a seven-month old daughter.
“A lesion?” I said. “You mean a tumor?”
“Yes,” he said.
And with that single syllable, I had cancer.
The particular form of the disease it turned out I have is a rare and incurable blood cancer called multiple myeloma. In the almost twenty years between the time I was diagnosed and the day of the Park Avenue South incident, I had undergone a barrage of treatments and been in and out of remission so many times I lost count. Those treatments included four rounds of radiation therapy (to my hip, neck, ribs, and nose); a six-month course of weekly intravenous immunotherapy (followed by seven years of a maintenance level of that therapy taken in pill form); another two-year round of immunotherapy involving the next-generation versions of the previous drugs I was on in pill form; a third-round of immunotherapy involving two new immunotherapy drugs administered weekly by IV for two more years; and six years and counting of monthly IV infusions of an agent used to boost my immune system, which has been compromised both by my disease and the treatments used to fight it.
But the most remarkable treatment I’ve had to date is a cutting-edge procedure, approved by the FDA for use in cases like mine only the year before I needed it, called CAR-T therapy.
CAR-T therapy involves harvesting your T-cells, a critical component of your immune system, from your bloodstream, then sending them to a lab where a protein called a chimeric antigen receptor, or CAR, is added to the surface of the T-cells (hence the acronym “CAR-T”). The CAR protein helps the T-cells recognize antigens found on the surface of specific cancer cells, in my case myeloma cells, so the T-cells can target and kill the malignant cells. The CAR-charged T-cells are then infused back into your body intravenously to do their work.
Before you can receive the treatment, you need to undergo two preparatory rounds of chemotherapy: a four-day hospital stay to administer a regimen known as DCEP meant to reduce the number of myeloma cells in your body to make the CAR-T treatment more effective and three days of an outpatient treatment called lymphodepletion, another form of chemotherapy, that kills off your existing T-cells to help the bioengineered T-cells attack the myeloma cells more effectively.
I had just completed Day Three of the lymphodepletion when the Park Avenue incident unfolded.
After my first infusion, I felt okay. After the second, I felt lousy. After the third, I felt as sick as I’ve been from any treatment I’ve had. I was nauseous, dizzy, and so weak I could barely drink a glass of water or get out of bed. I had to crawl on all fours to go to the bathroom.
After my final lymphodepletion treatment, I took a cab home from the hospital. It was Saturday, June 24, 2023, the day before the New York City Pride March, and because several major streets had already been blocked off, the traffic was gridlocked. A ride that might normally take forty-five minutes had already taken well over an hour, and I still had more than twenty blocks to go.
As we inched along Park Avenue South, a pickup truck pulled up alongside my cab. It was a red Ford F-150 with New Jersey plates. The driver and front-seat passenger were young men in their early twenties, wearing tank-tops and baseball caps. Bon Jovi was blasting from their speakers. If they were characters in a movie, you would have dismissed them as too on-the-nose.
As one does when one is in the middle of having one’s immune system wiped out in preparation for a futuristic cancer treatment, I was wearing a mask in the backseat of the cab and had my window down. The driver of the pickup, who was now no more than a few feet from me in the lane to my right, also had his window open. Even before he spoke, I knew what he was going to say.
The exact quote was, “Dude, lose the mask.” His wingman laughed.
In my family, we like to tell a story about my father. When I was maybe five years old, all six of us, my father, my mother, my three siblings, and I, were skiing in upstate New York. It was a particularly crowded day and there was a long line for one of the lifts.
When a group of teenagers tried to skip to the front, my father, who was a famously gentle soul but also someone who believed in rules, called them out.
“Sorry, guys,” he said. “We’ve all been waiting here a long time. You’ve got to go to the back of the line.”
The kids ignored him.
“Guys, go to the back.”
Nothing.
“Guys …”
And then: “Fuck you, old man.”
That was it. Something inside my normally mild-mannered father snapped. He popped his boots out of his skis, walked over to the kids, and grabbed the leader of the pack by his coat lapels.
“Go to the back,” he said. “Now!”
And to the back they went.
Back on Park Avenue South, I channeled my inner Gene Gluck.
I got out of the cab (the traffic was stopped anyway) and walked up to the pickup truck driver.
My midstreet soliloquy went something like this: “I’m a cancer patient, asshole. I am on my way home from a chemotherapy appointment. On Monday, I’m going into the hospital for two weeks of a treatment that could very well kill me. I’m wearing a mask because my immune system doesn’t work. Fuck you.”
In terms of the power of my performance, it didn’t hurt that, thanks to the DCEP and lymphodepletion, I hadn’t just lost most of my hair, but I was also thin and ashen looking.
In fairness, the second I stepped out of the cab, the driver seemed to sense what was happening, and once I confirmed his suspicion, he seemed genuinely remorseful.
“Sorry, dude,” he said. “My bad.”
I got back in the cab and he and his sidekick turned right at the next cross street, I suspect to avoid having to inch along next to me any longer.
Like my father, I am normally even-keeled. I pride myself on not being rash or quick to anger. (A former co-worker once nicknamed me “Mr. Reasonable.”) According to the generally accepted mores of human society, those are positive, even admirable, qualities. Our ability to govern our emotions is, in part, what separates us from the apes.
That’s all well and good. But in my case, anyway, I can be too assiduously reserved. A healthy degree of Stoicism is one thing; swallowing your emotions is another.
With rare exception, I had spent a lifetime doing more of the latter than the former. But on that day on Park Avenue South, all those years of carefully modulated behavior went out the window. Almost twenty years of living with cancer, coupled with one idiot’s callous (and to me politically repugnant) remark blew the lid off of my long-simmering mental pot.
Despite how physically ill I felt, I was filled with an almost superhuman sense of power. That feeling was only intensified by the thrill of committing a minor transgression, the sense of spontaneity, and, not least of all, a primal testosterone surge. Right there on Park Avenue South, I had transformed from Bruce Banner into the Incredible Hulk. (And thanks to the lymphodepletion, I looked almost as green.)
For the record, I don’t usually play the “cancer card.” In most situations, I feel like it’s too big a tool for the job, not to mention manipulative and self-righteous. But on that day, I made an exception.
How did it feel? For the first time in days, possibly months, I smiled. Actually, I laughed. Out loud. A maniacal, unhinged, almost demonic kind of laugh.
The feeling I was experiencing was so powerful and so rare, and came from somewhere so deep inside of me, it was almost a little unsettling. It was raw, unbridled human emotion. Reaction, not intention. Id, not superego. I had no control over it. It controlled me.
Mind you, I’m not suggesting it’s a good idea to go ballistic on a regular basis. But under the right circumstances, and for the right reasons, I am here to tell you it feels pretty good.
The taxi driver looked at me in the mirror.
“You good?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m good.”
And we set out again down Park Avenue.
Adapted from An Exercise in Uncertainty, Harmony Books, June 2025. For more information about the book, including where to buy it, go here. A portion of all sales from the book will go to cancer research.
