Golden Bachelor Gerry Turner shares bone marrow cancer diagnosis

There’s an unfortunate update to the saga of The Golden Bachelor‘s first season. Gerry Turner, the show’s inaugural septuagenarian lead, just shared that he has been diagnosed with Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia, a slow-growing bone marrow cancer that he joked had a “really long name” in a new interview with People. 

Turner was diagnosed after visiting an orthopedic surgeon for a shoulder injury he had sustained while teaching pickleball three years earlier. The surgeon apparently saw some “unusual blood markers” during his appointment, which eventually led to the diagnosis.

“Unfortunately, there’s no cure for it. So that weighs heavily in every decision I make,” Turner said. “It was like 10 tons of concrete were just dropped on me. And I was a bit in denial for a while, I didn’t want to admit to it.”

One of those decisions was to end his brief marriage to Theresa Nist, whom he had proposed to at the end of his season. The two lived multiple states apart and were trying to figure out how to make everything work when he received his diagnosis. “The conversation was brief and I think [she was] a little bit awestruck by the news. So understandable,” Turner said of revealing the prognosis to his then-wife.

“I wanted my life to continue on as normal as possible, and that led me to believing that as normal as possible more meant spending time with my family, my two daughters, my two son-in-laws, my granddaughters,” he continued. “The importance of finding the way with Theresa was still there, but it became less of a priority.”

Now, he hopes the public can reserve their “judgements” of the couple, which he said were “unfair” in the wake of the news of their divorce, especially since no one had all the information. For his part, “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.”