Back from film school in Vancouver, Dan Duffy was getting ready to move to L.A.…until he met his future wife. He was suffering intense back pain, which he blamed on a freak accident that had overturned his Jeep—but he managed to fall in love anyway. They’d been dating almost four months when, doing an exercise his chiropractor suggested, he felt something move. He probed, first tentatively, then with horrified fascination. There was a lump in his abdomen.
He showed his girlfriend, a pharmacist, and she said, “That shouldn’t be there.” He went to a doc-in-the-box, who frowned and said, “That shouldn’t be there.” He wangled an emergency appointment with a physician, who said, “Yeah, that shouldn’t be there.”
“My God,” Duffy thought, “This is The Three Stooges!” But things got serous fast: first an emergency CAT scan, then a needle biopsy. While he waited for the results, he called his girlfriend: “Stephanie, they think it’s lymphoma.” Dead silence. “If you don’t want to be here for this,” he continued, “I will understand.”
“No,” she said, “we’re going to fight this together every step of the way.”
He hung up and told his parents, “I’m going to marry that girl.”
When the biopsy results came back, Duffy’s doctor called, exuberant: “We’ve hit a home run! It’s testicular!”
Duffy hadn’t caught up. “You’re saying I have cancer,” he repeated slowly.
“Yeah, but it’s testicular! This is 95 percent curable!”
His oncologist, Dr. Burton Needles, chairman of oncology at Mercy Hospital St. Louis, remembers when the diagnosis gave a guy a 50–50 chance for survival. “Testicular cancer is one of our most dramatic success stories,” he says. Diagnosis improved and so did surgical techniques. Then, in 1974, Dr. Lawrence Einhorn, an oncologist at Indiana University Medical Center, found a secret weapon: Platinum dissolved testicular cancer. He developed the chemotherapy that cured cyclist Lance Armstrong, whose cancer had metastasized to his lungs, abdomen, and brain.
Duffy, too, had caught his cancer late: Stage 3, it had spread to his abdomen and entwined itself so insidiously that surgery and radiation were impossible. “It was so big, you could take it out and mold it into the size of an NFL football,” he says. “It encapsulated my pancreas, kidney, everything.” The pain came from the tumor pressing on his vertebrae, and by the time he was diagnosed, it was so severe that Needles wanted to admit him. Duffy refused, saying he had an important date.
Eight days later, over dinner at the Ritz-Carlton, he asked Stephanie to marry him. The next morning, he started chemotherapy.
Before he showed up for his first chemo session, Duffy had a stop to make: the sperm bank. His doctor had told him that if he ever wanted to have children biologically, he should freeze sperm before he started chemo. He’d put off the task until the last possible moment.
“So I go in the room, and there’s a couch and a chest of drawers and suboptimal filth. It’s like Playboy—not even Penthouse. I’m in there 25 minutes, and I can’t finish. Once it goes down, it’s not coming back up. Panic ensues. What do you say to the nurse when you walk out with an empty cup? And what if I’ve missed my opportunity? I have to go to chemo today.”
The nurse assures him that “about 40 percent of males in this position don’t” and sends him home with a sterile cup and instructions that make it a not-so-pleasurable process. “You can’t open the cup until you are about to finish, and your penis can’t touch the inside of the cup,” he says. “You have to be like a juggling clown as well as an acrobat, and then you have 30 minutes to get it back there or it could die.”
He managed, then went straight to chemo. “And thus started 13 weeks of hell,” he says: four hours a day for five days, two weeks off, repeat three times. He started on a Monday. By Wednesday, he was cocky: no nausea, no hair loss. Thursday, he woke up and didn’t want to move, lest he vomit.
His hair went next. “You have no control, so you try to control anything you can: You go to Great Clips and have them shave it off. ‘This isn’t too bad,’ you think. ‘I always wondered what I’d look like bald…’ And then you lose your eyebrows and your eyelashes, and nothing’s prepared you for that. You are never actually told, ‘So basically you are going to look like a naked mole rat for a little while.’ For the first time, you look at yourself in the mirror and you look like a cancer patient.”
After the chemo, Needles scheduled a PET scan. “The fine print was, you’ll be catheterized,” Duffy says. “It took two orderlies, one to insert the tube and one to hold me down.” After numerous tries, an orderly said, “Do you want this up there or not?”
Duffy looked at him incredulously. “Is this a trick question?”
Once they finally succeeded in catheterizing him, he lay stock still, terrified to move. His cellphone rang. Like a fool, he answered. It was Chris Schneithorst, one of his best friends since age 16, saying, “C’mon, let’s go to lunch.”
“I’m a little busy right now.’
“Doing what?”
“Getting catheterized at St. John’s.”
“Y’know, Duffy, it’s always something with you.”
Schneithorst had grilled him with questions all along, asking about postsurgical appearance and side effects nobody wants to mention. Other friends were equally blunt and curious. “I got to talk about it without actually saying I needed to talk about it,” Duffy says. “It destigmatized it for me, and it demystified it for them.
“When you go through cancer, you’re in an odd fraternity,” he remarks. He used to be sympathetic and uncomfortable if someone talked about cancer. “I’d say, ‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry.’ Now I say, ‘Oh my God, really? What kind? Did you go through chemo? Did you lose any body parts?’”
Alas, Duffy’s PET scan results were so wacky, presumably from the stress, that his doctor told him they had to repeat the test.
“You are not going to catheterize me again.”
“We have to.”
“Then knock me unconscious.”
“I can’t justify using resources that way.”
“Then forget it.”
That night, a friend mused, “You could always pull a Jesus.” Duffy looked at him blankly. The friend prompted him: “What did Jesus do before he died?”
“Make a dinner reservation?”
“He fasted.”
If Duffy didn’t eat or drink for three days, there would be no sucrose molecules to bind and give a false positive, hence no reason to catheterize him. His doctor gave reluctant approval (“I gave him no choice,” Duffy says) and issued strenuous warnings about the risks of dehydration. This time, the results were clear.
He’d beat it.
He and Stephanie got married. Two years later, they decided to start a family. Duffy went to see his urologist, to “test the swimmers.” One-third were still doing the butterfly stroke, and the Duffys now have two little redheads, Sam and Ben.
“A year and a half ago, I walked into Wash. U., where they were cryogenically keeping everything, and said, ‘I’m not going to renew,’” he says. “I walked out with a big smile on my face. That was really the end.”
Except it was the beginning. Duffy has started a nonprofit, The Half Fund (thehalffund.org), with the American Cancer Society as a partner. He intends to raise enough money to produce his screenplay, Half—a comedy about testicular cancer—and use the proceeds to give grants to artists with commercially viable cancer-education projects.
His movie’s funnier than his own story, he says: The sperm-bank scene’s been embellished, and the main character’s surlier. “Also, he vomits a lot more. I’m not a good vomiter,” he says. “And his brother takes him to buy pot, and this unsavory guy says, ‘Nice car. You walkin’ home?’ The brother says, ‘This is an emergency!’
“‘Oh yeah? What kind of emergency?’
“‘He has cancer!’
“And the guy says, ‘Really? What kind? My mom had that.’”
