Gerry Turner and Theresa Nist captured the hearts of reality TV romance lovers last year when he chose her as his bride on “The Golden Bachelor,” before the couple split a few months later.
Show fans naturally had questions about the quick breakup, and Turner now tells People that one of the factors that led them to quit was a cancer diagnosis.
“I think it’s time, also because it will probably clear up a lot of the mystery surrounding what happened in February, March and April,” said the Indiana-based Turner.
Turner told the publication that he was diagnosed with a slow-growing “bone marrow cancer.” a “very long name” right around the time he and his new bride were “trying really hard to find our lifestyle and where we were going to live and how we were going to make our life work.”
The couple had a whirlwind romance after meeting on the ABC reality show and ended up tying the knot on TV in January, just a few months after the show’s finale.
When Turner and Nist announced their split on “Good Morning America” in April, they didn’t give a specific reason but did suggest that living in different states was an issue.
“We looked at houses in South Carolina, we considered New Jersey, and we just looked at house after house, but we never got to the point where we made that decision,” Nist said.
Eric McCandless via Getty Images
“Thérèsa and I have had a number of heart-to-heart conversations… and we have mutually come to the conclusion that it is probably time to dissolve our marriage,” Turner said at the time.
Turner said he discovered the disease around the same time he started life at Nist.
An orthopedic surgeon treating him for a shoulder injury noticed some unusual blood markers and referred him to an oncologist. He now works with a hematology-oncology group in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
“Unfortunately there is no cure for it. So that weighs heavily on every decision I make,” he said of the diagnosis. “It was like 10 tons of concrete just fell on me. And I was in denial for a while, I didn’t want to admit it.”
Turner shared the information about his illness with Nist in February before further testing.
“Definitely, it was tough for me,” he says about the conversation with Nist. “But the conversation was short, I think [she was] a little impressed by the news. So understandable.”
After processing the news, Turner realized he wanted his life to be as normal as possible, “and that led me to believe that as normal as possible meant spending time with my family, my two daughters, my two sons-in-law, my granddaughters.”
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But as a result, he admits that “the importance of finding our way with Theresa was still there, but it became less of a priority.”
Because Turner did not immediately reveal his medical findings publicly, he said many viewers made “judgments” about the breakup that he said were “unfair.”
“I hope people now understand in retrospect that that had a huge influence on my decisions and I think it probably did on Theresa as well,” he said, adding that he hopes fans will now “look at things a little bit differently.” , and realizing that “Maybe it wasn’t really a hasty, quick decision that people thought.”