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The malignancy had already begun to metastasize.

Which meant that it was now crawling through him.

It swam in his blood.

It was eating his arm in half—a bone lesion, they called it.

An expansile lytic lesion of his left humerus, specifically.

Which was what made it hurt.

Radiation was recommended.

“Upfront, we told him that it was palliative, probably not curative,” said Rubins. “And that there were no guarantees. Frankly, it was his option. We thought that maybe it would buy some time.”

He heard the word inoperable but not the word incurable.

That was all that he heard.

It was difficult to understand anything that he heard.

“He didn’t know that there wasn’t a difference,” said Linda. “He had no idea. They said, ‘We aren’t going to operate.’ And so Andy said, ‘Fine. Great.’ He didn’t ask any questions. He didn’t ask anything. He thought, ‘They aren’t going to operate—that’s a good thing.’ He didn’t know it was terminal lung cancer. Andy didn’t know what that was.”

George had come to Cedars-Sinai to hear the diagnosis and sat there with him and they heard. “He said, ‘George, you gotta get me on the Letterman show after Christmas so David could ask me, “Andy, what did you get for Christmas?” and I could say, “Cancer.”’ That was the first thing that he said to me after the doctor told him.”

He called Lynne in San Francisco: “He called me and said, ‘See? See? I told you. I’ve got cancer!’ You know, it was that type of thing. He knew he was gonna get it and I hadn’t believed him. It was like, ‘See, I told you so….’”

He wasn’t afraid because it wasn’t going to kill him because he wasn’t going to die because he would do things and eat things and try things and make it go away, so he was, um, fine.

He wanted no one else to know, especially his family. Since he was not going to die, there was no reason to alarm anyone. Lynne came down from San Francisco and moved into the little bedroom with him at Linda’s. He did not want the radiation. He drank herbal sludges instead. The arm felt better; then the arm felt excruciating. They went to Dr. Irwin Grossman in Beverly Hills who gave the arm radiation and the pain stopped. “He became my immediate best friend,” said Grossman. “He was very sweet, very appreciative.” The radiation helped the pneumonia as well, since it shrunk the tumor blockage, thus lessened the cough. Eventually, he would see Grossman every day, receive a one minute dosage of pinpointed radiation and leave. Nausea was ever attendant. He once threw up in Linda’s car on the way home. He decided to call and tell Michael on Christmas Eve. Michael heard his brother say the word malignant; like his brother, he chose not to fully grasp what that meant. Andy swore him to secrecy and Michael said nothing to anyone.

He slipped in and out of Cedars-Sinai for tests. He wondered sometimes what they were testing for. Some days, he drove himself to his appointments; some days, he was driven. He often made Rubins and Young wait before entering the examination rooms to see him, because he was meditating—“You waited for him,” said Young. “Doctors, you know, are not used to waiting.” Some days were very extremely angry days. He avoided sadness, however, for the most part, since there were alternatives. “Andy didn’t want to hear bad things,” said Rubins. He researched alternative treatments, and so did Lynne, and so did Linda. “He was not a person who gave in to failure,” said Young. “He believed that, through his spirit, he was gonna win, that he was not gonna die.” He listened to visualization tapes constantly and wrote out affirmations—“I’m getting better and better every day.” He wrote better and better over and over. He also wrote, “I’m not my Papu Cy, therefore I can’t have cancer.”

“These things are really proven to be chromosomal,” said Young. “It’s all about just having the wrong genes.”

George started talking into his tape recorder again on New Year’s Day. On January 7, he reported, I went to bed at 1 A.M. and slept restlessly until 4 A.M. and couldn’t sleep after that. I cried