Gerry Turner, star of ABC‘s The Golden Bachelor, is opening up about his recent cancer diagnosis.
In an interview with People magazine published Wednesday, the 72-year-old reflected on his divorce from Theresa Nist, whom he got engaged to on the finale of the Golden Bachelor and got married to during a wedding broadcast on ABC in January 2024. Just three months after getting married, Turner and Nist announced their decision to divorce during a joint interview on Good Morning America. Though at the time they cited not being able to settle on a place to live together as the reason, fo the first time Turner revealed what else was going on behind the scenes.
“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,” he shared.
After getting a shoulder injury while teaching a pickleball class three years prior to going on the show, Turner said it was when he finally got around to going to the doctor when he learned his diagnosis. He recalled the orthopedic surgeon saying, “‘Yeah Gerry, there’s not much we can do for your shoulder, but there are some unusual blood markers here.’ 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.”
Turner was diagnosed with a slow-growing “bone marrow cancer” called Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia, he revealed. “Unfortunately, there’s no cure for it. So that weighs heavily in every decision I make,” he 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.”
His oncologists first told him that he had a “blood disorder” but Turner said he “pretty much” knew it would be cancer. After sharing his blood disorder with Nist, Turner underwent additional testing, including a bone marrow biopsy, which is when his diagnosis became more definitive. Turner then said he decided to tell Nist “what I knew and I explained the situation to her.”
“Certainly, it was hard for me. But the conversation was brief and I think [she was] a little bit awestruck by the news. So understandable,” he said.
“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 said. “And the importance of finding the way with Theresa was still there, but it became less of a priority.”
“When you are hit with that kind of news and the shock wears off after a few days or a few weeks and you regroup and you realize what’s important to you, that’s where you start to move forward,” he added. “And 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.”
“Hopefully they’ll look at things a little bit differently, that maybe it wasn’t quite a rash, fast decision that people thought. That there was something else going on.”
Going forward, Turner said he’s going to “pack as much fun as I possibly can into my life and enjoy every moment. And when I’m gone, I’m gone, but I’m not going to have regrets.” He also wished Nist “all of the good luck in the world, that she finds everything she wants to.”
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