Most of us with myeloma have probably experienced those days when some drug side effect has ruined an otherwise perfectly good spring day, or summer afternoon.

In the first year of my post-stem cell transplant days, I managed to find myself in the hospital on Memorial Day, July 4, and Labor Day weekends.  How exciting.  On one of those stays, I clearly recall sitting and reading a book by the room’s open window, listening to revelers late in the night …

Back in 1988, Phyllis Susser, one of the founders and the executive director of Herbert G. Birch Community Services (now Birch Family Services), was establishing a home in Brooklyn for abandoned AIDS babies.

Some of us were helping her deal with the overwhelming negativity and ferocious opposition from the neighbors and the surrounding community.

It was at this Brooklyn residence for babies, whose only home to that point had been a hospital, that I met Geraldine Ferraro.

Back in the …

I like to communicate with my doctors by email.

Having spent a great deal of my career talking on the phone, the embracing of email in the work world has had a profound change in the way I do business.   Once upon a time, I might spend as much as two-thirds of the day on the phone.  Today, there’s an awful lot of time between phone calls.  Sometimes a whole workday goes by.

Anyway, it’s not always easy – sometimes …

Everybody reacts differently, I’ve learned, to the challenges that come with a multiple myeloma diagnosis.

What I might dislike or find annoying may not be so troublesome to someone else. Similarly, things that may not bother me much, if at all, can be hugely vexing to others.

Sometimes, as patients, we can be drawn into situations by our disease where we aren’t sure exactly what to expect. Most of us, I think, take these things in stride, and grin and …

One of the things I think I know is that multiple myeloma is often harder on caregivers than it is on the person with the disease.

To some, that may seem counter-intuitive. You’d probably consider that the person with the disease is the one confronting the harder road to travel on, but I believe such a perspective ignores the turmoil, the emotional roller-coaster. and the uncertainty that caregivers face.

I don’t mean to diminish the impact of what becomes an …

I was thinking the other day about mortality. By no means am I obsessed with this, but a thought process about one’s own mortality is, for me at least, sometimes unavoidable, given a life-shortening multiple myeloma diagnosis.

There doesn’t seem to be much written – there’s some – about the psychic impact of living with a disease that’s pretty much always fatal, and one where you don’t really have a clue when your myeloma will turn on you and go …

I don’t know about you, but I’m not too clear-headed about the appointment where I got my initial myeloma diagnosis.

First of all, I suppose I should have taken it as an ominous sign when the hematologist/oncologist’s office called me and asked if I could be there in an hour.

Basically, this is really all I recall:

We went into the exam room, and the doctor sat on his little wheeled stool. Linda (my wife) and I sat …