At 72, ‘Golden Bachelor’ Star Gerry Turner Reveals Cancer Diagnosis
The Golden Bachelor star Gerry Turner, 72, revealed that he was diagnosed with cancer.
He hopes this news will shed light on his seemingly sudden divorce from The Golden Bachelor winner Theresa Nist.
His cancer is rare, but treatable.
Fans of The Golden Bachelor may have noticed Gerry Turner’s retreat from the spotlight in recent months. Many have attributed it to his sudden divorce from Theresa Nist in April after the pair were married for three months. But the 72-year-old is now sharing a new piece of the puzzle: Shortly after he and Nist married, Turner was diagnosed with a rare bone marrow cancer.
“There’s a topic that I haven’t wanted to talk about until now,” he told People. “I think it’s time, also because it probably will clear up a lot of mystery around what happened back in February, March, and April.”
He continued: “As Theresa and I were trying very hard to find our lifestyle and where we were going to live and how we were going to make our life work, I was unfortunately diagnosed with cancer.”
The discovery surfaced sort of inadvertently when Turner went to a doctor’s appointment he had been putting off after injuring his shoulder during a pickleball match. “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 recalled.
Doctors first thought he might have a blood disorder, Turner explained, but he was ultimately diagnosed with a slow-growing bone marrow cancer with a “really long name,” he said, called Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia (WM).
What is Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia?
WM, also known as lymphoplasmacytic lymphoma, is pretty rare—there are three cases per million people per year in the United States, according to the American Cancer Society (ACS). It’s a type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in which cancer cells make excessive amounts of an abnormal protein called a macroglobulin. That protein builds up in the body and may lead to symptoms like excess bleeding, vision problems, and nervous system problems.
WM cells grow mainly in bone marrow, where they can crowd out normal cells that the blood needs to function, per the ACS. This can lead to low red and white blood cell counts, which may cause fatigue, weakness, and low immunity. Platelet numbers in the blood may also be affected, making patients more prone to bleeding and bruising.
“Unfortunately, there’s no cure for it,” Turner told People. “So that weighs heavily in every decision I make. It was like 10 tons of concrete were just dropped on me.” However, there is a 78% five-year survival rate for the disease, per the ACS. That’s likely because not all cases of WM need immediate treatment—it’s more about symptom monitoring and management, the ACS says. The most common forms of treatment are chemotherapy and immunotherapy. Turner said he’s currently working with “a hematology-oncology group in Fort Wayne.”
Rumors have swirled around the cause of Turner and Nist’s recent divorce, and Turner said he hopes this news sheds some light on the situation. “I hope that people understand in retrospect now that that had a huge bearing on my decisions and I think probably Theresa’s as well,” he said. (Nist told People that his diagnosis “wasn’t a factor in the ending of the relationship, at least not for me.”)
Turner continued: “Hopefully they’ll look at things a little bit differently, that maybe it wasn’t quite a rash, fast decision that people thought.”
The father of two, who resides in Indiana, plans to go forward prioritizing quality time with his family. “I’m going to pack as much fun as I possibly can into my life and enjoy every moment,” he said. “And when I’m gone, I’m gone, but I’m not going to have regrets.”
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