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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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, …

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 …

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 …