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 | Dec 29, 2011 1:25 pm | 13 Comments ]
Birds In Spring: Communicating Across Doctor Lines

I wish my doctors talked with each other.

Not all of them, just the main ones:  My two oncologists, my primary care physician, and my nephrologist.  Those are the doctors that I see regularly.

Sometimes they send each other their notes from my most recent visit, although I’m not sure this happens efficiently all the time.  On top of that, I suspect that these office visit notes don’t get read until I pop up in the queue for an appointment …

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[ by | Nov 15, 2011 9:43 am | 27 Comments ]
Birds In Spring: As Time Goes By

Since I got my myeloma diagnosis five and a half years ago, I haven’t been given to bouts of depression.

With a myeloma diagnosis, you really don’t have time to feel sorry for yourself.

I’ve tried to take in stride all the things “they” have done to me – two autologus stem cell transplants, a myriad of chemotherapy side effects, an open lung biopsy, and endless needle sticks, just to name a few.

Then there’s the prodding, probing, and testing …

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[ by | Oct 18, 2011 11:20 am | 5 Comments ]
Birds In Spring: May The Force Be With You

I think I am a believer in “The Force.”  No, let’s say that I do believe in it.

So that raises the question: What the heck is it?

The traditional thinking is that there’s an energy force that you can tap, consciously or perhaps not, that can help you fight the “bad things” that are affecting you personally.  Maybe even to completely resist them.

Some people might refer to this as “force of will,” which I think is also a …

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[ by | Sep 20, 2011 3:05 pm | 18 Comments ]
Birds In Spring: Does Having Cancer Change Others’ Opinions Of You?

I recently read an article in the Kansas City Star that looked at how cancer patients are treated by others, and how we are looked upon by our society in general.

Overall, I thought the sense of the article was quite negative, but maybe not far off the mark.

It reminded me, too, that I don’t really want others to think of me first off as a cancer patient.

A couple of years ago, for example, I was speaking …

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[ by | Aug 16, 2011 11:46 am | 13 Comments ]
Birds In Spring: Ten Self-Preservation Tips For A Hospital Admission

In last month’s column, I took a look at risks patients face in hospitals, mostly from the perspective of “adverse events” – harmful, even fatal, occurrences that are unrelated to your underlying medical problem.  They occur in almost a third of admissions.

Kent Bradley, one of the commenters on last month’s column, rightly pointed out that on top of the adverse event numbers, you have to consider also medical errors – mistakes that are made in treating you.  So, …

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[ by | Jul 19, 2011 2:44 pm | 12 Comments ]
Birds In Spring: Hospitals – Good Places Where Bad Things Can Happen

We myeloma patients spend a lot of time in and at hospitals.

Hospitals are places where wonderful things happen – lives are saved, the ill are made well, and worn-out bodies are restored – much due to what the cliché refers to as “miracles of modern medicine.”

There’s another side to hospitals, though, that demands wariness and requires that you pay the greatest attention to what’s going on around you.  Pat Killingsworth wrote about one aspect of this last week …

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[ by | Jun 21, 2011 11:56 am | 16 Comments ]
Birds In Spring: The Story Of My Diagnosis And Initial Treatment

I thought I’d share with you a bit of the story about multiple myeloma and me.

Mostly, I’ve resisted conveying this tale, but I realized lately that when I meet people with myeloma for the first time, we quickly start talking about how we learned we had the disease and how we’ve been treated.

If I’ve learned anything from these talks it is that we are all so different – with treatments that can be widely divergent, and with greatly …

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