Gerry Turner from The Golden Bachelor has updated fans on his cancer treatment.
Turner, who revealed his bone marrow cancer diagnosis in December, appeared on Tuesday’s episode of the Bachelor Happy Hour podcast, where he discussed his condition with hosts Joe Amabile and Serena Pitt.
“I feel great,” he said. “Until I have any symptoms, there's no treatment. So I go frequently for blood tests. I'm on, like, a six-month schedule now, and I feel optimistic because the doctor has said, ‘Well, when you turn 75, we're going to have to go three-month increments.’ So it's telling me that at least he expects me to live another couple of years to get to that. But the bottom line is I feel really good.”
Turner added that he was seeing the diagnosis as an opportunity to “live like you’re dying” and never shies away from saying “yes” to anything he’s offered.
“The person I'm dating will say, ‘Do you want to go do-’ And before she even gets out the rest of the sentence, I will say yes. So I'm in on everything,” he continued.
“And it makes life exciting because you kind of in the back of your head feel like you've got a lot of living to do, and you don't know how long you have to do it, so don't turn down anything. And so, in a way, it's really a good thing.”
The Golden Bachelor alum revealed in a December interview with People that he found out about having cancer after suffering a shoulder injury while playing pickleball three years ago.
“Finally I got around to going [to the doctor] and the orthopedic surgeon said, ‘Yeah Gerry, there’s not much we can do for your shoulder, but there are some unusual blood markers here,’” he said at the time. “And so an orthopedic surgeon went to my family doctor, my family doctor referred me to an oncologist, and now I’m working with a hematology-oncology group in Fort Wayne.”
He continued: “Unfortunately, there’s no cure for it. So that weighs heavily in every decision I make.”
Turner’s condition was formally known as Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia, which is when white blood cells are transformed into cancer cells, according to the Mayo Clinic. It is also considered a type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Although Turner was only originally told he had a “blood disorder,” he explained that he “pretty much” knew it would lead to cancer.
