Improv, if not improve: Living through cancer

In a world where we watch disaster dramas to rehearse fear from a safe distance, few of us contemplate the slow horror of cancer until it strikes someone we know. Jim Melloan’s story forces that confrontation. A familiar presence on New York’s arts scene, he is an actor, editor, musician, and writer who has been involved in downtown performance since 1996. Decades before his diagnosis, he co‑founded ImprovBoston; he later managed the Inc. 500 list for Inc. magazine and wrote for Worth. In 2013, he began a Facebook series revisiting chart‑topping hits from fifty years ago and spun it into a weekly show, 50 Years Ago This Week, on Radio Free Brooklyn. He lives alone but remains connected through the stories and songs he shares.

Last year, Melloan noticed trouble: fatigue, abdominal pain, and a diagnosis of gallbladder cancer that had already spread to his liver.“I was happy to make it to seventy years old,” he admitted, “my oncologist told me that the average survival rate for somebody with my diagnosis was one to one and a half years.” Median survival for primary gallbladder cancer is roughly nineteen months, so the prognosis was stark. Yet he decided to treat the disease as another improv scene. Gallbladder cancer, unlike the imaginary monsters we conjure, cannot be slain with a plot twist; it demands endurance and wit.

Melloan went on oxaliplatin, a platinum‑based chemotherapy drug notorious for causing sensory neuropathy in more than 90 percent of patients. Within weeks, he fell in his apartment, twisting his ankle and fracturing a fibula. “I still have severe neuropathy in the feet, legs, and fingers,” he said, “so I need a rollator to get around.” 

I see chemotherapy as a hostage situation: “You try to shoot the bad cell without hitting the hostage.” The drug numbed Melloan’s extremities and made him sensitive to cold; he manages debilitating diarrhea with over‑the‑counter remedies. He tried acupuncture and trawled social media for cures, even as chatbots told him they wouldn’t work, and he laughed at the absurdity of seeking miracle fixes. He quipped that he felt “a little too early for the nanobots.”

Humor is his shield, but he also draws on my broader theories. I am against the “disease‑ification” of addiction and the way insurers profit from multiple detoxes, urging a free‑market approach that has driven down the cost of elective procedures like LASIK. Melloan agrees that medicine often overreaches. Yet he also embodies that life is worth living despite illness. He celebrated his seventieth birthday with nine friends and marveled that anyone came. “Life is still worth living,” he said, and he meant it. He continues to host his radio show, to reminisce about old hits, and to encourage listeners to “keep on trucking.” In my framework, cancer may be a deadly gamble, but Melloan’s refusal to fold reminds us that endurance and wit can be a winning hand.

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