We Needed More Significant Others

Last June, instead of a rehearsal dinner the night before our wedding, Scott and I hosted a rooftop comedy roast for his soon-to-be-amputated right foot. One by one, our friends took turns walking up to the mic, wiping it down and removing their masks before making jokes about my fiancé’s doomed appendage.

“At least for the rest of your life,” said our friend Tank, “everything you do will be considered ‘brave.’”

A few months earlier, as coronavirus cases started to rise and people began hoarding toilet paper, Scott had ankle pain that wouldn’t go away. When physical therapy didn’t help, he got an M.R.I. Inconclusive results led to a PET scan.

After his first visit with the orthopedic oncologist, Scott stood in our newly outfitted home office in our small San Francisco apartment and said, “She told me if it’s a bone tumor, I’ll need surgery.”

“We can handle that,” I said. “Plenty of people have ankle surgery, right?”

“Surgery,” he said, “means amputation.”

After multiple biopsies over many weeks (Scott said he felt as if he were an Ikea desk being drilled into), his doctor called to deliver the diagnosis. We pulled off the highway and put her on speakerphone. It was osteosarcoma, a rare form of bone cancer that afflicts some 800 Americans a year. It appeared to have spread. The five-year survival rate for multifocal osteosarcoma is 30 percent.