9/11 Cop in 40th Month of Cancer Fight

For Detective John Walcott, the trouble began in the spring of 2003.

NYPD Detective John Walcott has been battling leukemia for 40 months. He believes he contracted the cancer as a result of the hundreds of hours he spent involved in the Sept. 11 rescue and recovery efforts.

(Walcott Family)

For "some crazy reason I was feeling sluggish," he said, but he dismissed it, thinking he was just "exhausted from the long season" he'd spent coaching a high school varsity hockey team that he'd led to a sectional championship.

"I just didn't feel right," he said to ABC News.

He was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia (AML) and was told that without a bone marrow transplant he would die.

A hematologist friend of Walcott's told him grimly, "I'm not going to lie to you. You're going to go in for the most painful experience of your life. They're going to stick this, like, 5-foot needle down your spine, take a fish hook, and carve your bone marrow out."

Walcott, a detective from one of the most crime-ridden precincts in the Bronx, passed out from the pain.

He spent a month in the hospital and then came home to his family in Pomona, N.Y.

But he was too susceptible to infection to leave the house.

He said his daughter couldn't go to birthday parties or play dates, and he couldn't leave his house.

Coaching the hockey team again was completely out of the question.

"If you had a cold or even allergies, you couldn't come over to my house. … At Christmastime my uncle had a cold and he couldn't come over," Walcott said. "Turned out he passed away [the following] May."

Walcott said he was approaching his 40th month in remission.

Like hundreds of police and firefighters who responded to the call for help on Sept. 11, Walcott believes his cancer is related to his work on "the Pile," as ground zero is known to the men and women who volunteered there.

He is part of a class-action lawsuit alleging that the city, state and federal government did not adequately protect ground zero workers.

He at times became concerned that he sounded like he was complaining. He said his biggest regret was the toll his leukemia had taken on his young daughter.

"She's had a crummy childhood. There's no way around it," he said.