A myeloma diagnosis is overwhelming in so many ways. Not only do you have to face the fact that you now have an incurable disease, you have to learn an en­tire­ly new vocabulary – and learn it fast.

M-spike. MGUS. IgG. Smoldering myeloma. Revlimid.

I’d never heard any of these terms before the fall of 2005. Now they’re part of my regular vocabulary.

I’m not one for learning languages. I struggled through many semesters of Spanish in high school and …

I realized something weird the other day: I really miss donating blood.

Of all of the things multiple myeloma has taken from me, I’d never really con­sid­ered this one: I can’t be a blood donor ever again.

And that kind of stinks.

I take Revlimid (lenalidomide), which means – understandably – that I’m for­bid­den from sharing my blood with others. My blood is poisonous and dangerous and nobody wants it.

If you’ve ever taken Revlimid, you’ve taken the …

Shortly before Thanksgiving, I started seeing my Facebook news feed fill up with articles about how to make healthy food choices during the holiday season. How to avoid weight gain. Why cookies will kill you, and why you need to step away from the eggnog and head to the gym.

I started seeing friends complain about the size of their thighs. They revealed the crushing guilt they feel from having that extra serving of mashed potatoes. They acknowledged that they’re …

The other day, I realized I share a common bond with my daughter’s pet fish: We’re both survivors.

Maybe I’m getting too attached to this fish. Maybe I’m overthinking things. Just hear me out.

Statistically, betta fish who come to live in our home have an extremely low survival rate.

When a fish learns he is going to live in the Crowley house, it is grim news indeed. It is essentially a death sentence. The fish is stunned. He begins …

Does anyone else remember exactly when their old, regular, pre-myeloma life ended? I can still pinpoint the last moment of my old life. I think about it every Halloween.

It was the moment right before I pressed the “play” button on my answer­ing machine on the afternoon of October 31, 2005. Until I pressed that button, I was a regular, healthy, 30-year-old stay-at-home mom to a five-month-old baby.

After I pressed it, I was a myeloma patient.

No symptoms. No …

I’ve always had an overactive imagination. It was fun when I was a kid and I could live in the Land of Oz. It’s not so fun now when I’m waiting for my monthly test results.

Things were much worse in the olden days (2005), when I was first diagnosed with smoldering multiple myeloma. I’d never had a serious illness before, so I had very little experience with doctors outside of a regular checkup. I didn’t really understand how doctors’ …

When I was first diagnosed with myeloma in 2005, I was a 30-year-old new mom, and I felt very alone.

It wasn’t that I didn’t have friends around me. I did – and they were all supportive and helpful. Most of them were also 30-year-old new moms, so I never felt alone motherhood-wise.

Cancer-wise, however, nobody else I knew was going through what I was going through. All of my friends were busy having more babies and look­ing toward the …