When we are diagnosed with multiple myeloma, we find that we have to con­front our own mortality. Since it’s something we all face, I thought I’d share some thoughts on the topic.

Some may find this a bit morbid.  I don’t blame them.  Nobody really likes to talk about death and dying.  Especially their own.

I prefer to write about more cheerful topics, but one can’t be cheerful all the time.  Today’s not particularly cheerful either for that matter.  Like …

I got to thinking recently about pets and their impact on people’s lives.

What brought this on is I was reading about how people with pets tend to live longer.

That, along with something else that I’ll get to shortly, started this whole line of thinking about pets.

A Google search revealed that the conventional wisdom about having pets is that people who have them are happier and healthier.

While dogs are often considered at the top of the heap …

One of the things that having cancer has exposed me to is random acts of kindness.

I first encountered this concept from something the late Princess Diana once said:

"Carry out a random act of kindness, with no expectation of reward, safe in the knowledge that one day someone might do the same for you."

Not everything about having cancer is bad.  Disgraced bicyclist Lance Armstrong, for example, perceived his cancer as “a gift.”

That’s because confronting a diagnosis that …

A group of researchers in India published a study recently that had me jump to two conclusions.

Their research followed 170 autologous stem cell transplant patients over the years, starting around 1990, to see how these multiple myeloma patients fared.

There is, of course, good news and bad news.

The first takeway seems to be that you can make a case that things are getting better.

The research adds to the body of knowledge indicating that novel agents are …

There’s been a fair amount of discussion lately in the columns and comment boards here at The Myeloma Beacon about stem cell transplants, as well as their effectiveness and their impact on our bodies.

Myeloma patients who have yet to have a transplant often scour the Internet looking for help and information about what they may face.  For many, stem cell transplantation is not an “if,” but more a matter of when.

The pre-transplant period brings for most people uncertainty, …

Getting a multiple myeloma diagnosis just stuns you.

That is, once you figure out what it is and what it means.

I’d guess that most people who are confronted with the news probably have never heard of myeloma.  I can say that I’d heard of it, but knew absolutely nothing about it.  I wasn’t even sure it was cancer.

Two things about myeloma stuck in my mind in the aftermath of my diagnosis in 2006: Incurable. Almost invariably fatal.

It didn’t take …

Pssst…wanna buy some stem cells?

It seems there’s nothing to stop you now, you know.

It used to be that compensating individuals for donating peripheral blood stem cells (PBSCs) was a crime, a felony actually.  Up to five years in a federal prison.  For anyone involved in a PBSC donation for which compensation or some type of payment had been made.  This included the recipient of the “illegally” gotten stem cells.

There’s been a battle raging for many years over …