Lou Ganim's Archive

Lou Ganim wrote a monthly column for The Myeloma Beacon from June 2010 through November 2013. Lou’s career has spanned more than four decades in the newspaper, government, and health care fields. He moved to a small town in New York’s Saratoga County that had only one traffic light more than thirty years ago, only to watch it explode in population around him. Now, he bemoans the traffic and misses the stars he used to see from his front porch that are now blocked by light pollution. Lou was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in May 2006, and his Beacon column is titled “Birds in Spring,” which takes its name from a line in the 1970s Judy Collins' song “Who Knows Where the Time Goes” (written by Sandy Denny), which goes like this: So come the storms of winter, and then the birds in spring again.

Lou Ganim has written 32 article(s) .

[ by | Nov 21, 2013 4:06 pm | 12 Comments ]
Reaper, Stay Away From My Door

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 …

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[ by | Jun 27, 2013 1:48 pm | 17 Comments ]
Pet Appreciation

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 …

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[ by | Jan 15, 2013 11:59 am | 23 Comments ]
Birds In Spring: Random Acts Of Kindness

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 …

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[ by | Nov 20, 2012 4:50 pm | 5 Comments ]
Birds In Spring: Taking In Good News With The Bad

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 …

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[ by | Oct 30, 2012 4:59 pm | 11 Comments ]
Birds In Spring: The Post-Transplant Life

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, …

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[ by | Sep 18, 2012 1:44 pm | 15 Comments ]
Birds In Spring: Thoughts About Survival

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 …

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[ by | Aug 22, 2012 11:32 am | 10 Comments ]
Birds In Spring: Stem Cells For Sale

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 …

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