Only Human: Max Ritvo

Earlier this week, the WNYC program Only Human featured Max Ritvo, a poet, comic, and "inspiring cancer survivor."

At 24, Max Ritvo has a lot going for him. He's a gifted poet with a teaching job at Columbia University and a manuscript that he's shopping to publishers. He's a new husband. He's a comic in a darkly funny experimental improv group. But he's also a cancer patient whose prognosis isn't good.

Max was diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma when he was 16. He got the news after going to the hospital with a fever and a pain in his side. The doctors at first thought it was pneumonia — but then Max woke up in the cancer ward.

"I remember thinking, 'This is so terrible! I'm just a young, acrobatic, wiry, handsome bloke of sixteen!'" he says. "'And they must have run out of beds elsewhere, and they're putting this virile healthy young man with a great crop of hair among all these decrepit old people with cancer milling about. And it's so sad for them.'"

Listen to the interview:

At top: Ritvo and Only Human's host, Mary Harris.