As an engineer, my professional life is governed by numbers: how many kilo­grams of fuel will it take to perform a maneuver, how many degrees should we rotate the spacecraft towards the Sun, etc.

My life as a myeloma patient is also dominated by numbers: IgA and kappa light chain readings, Revlimid (lenalidomide) and dexamethasone (Decadron) doses, and so on.

With this focus on numbers, it is probably not surprising that I tend to remember dates. For …

“Calibration” is a good engineering word. It means “to check, adjust, or determine by comparison with a standard; to make corrections in.” We use the word quite a lot in both technical and general contexts. It also seems to me to have many applications when dealing with multiple myeloma.

Let me start out with some examples of the use of the word in my work at NASA.

The mission that I am working on is flying four spacecraft in a …

January 19 is the anniversary of my stem cell trans­plant. I celebrate the “birthday” of my immune system each year. This year was the 9th such celebration, which seems fairly amazing to me.

Before my trans­plant, I had read about a survivor who was hoping to get two or three years of remission from his trans­plant. His account really set my ex­pec­ta­tions. Of course, I now realize that things are not that pre­dict­able with myeloma: some people do better, some …

Since it’s nearly the holidays, I’m sure that the story of Apollo 8 is on everyone’s mind.

Well, perhaps not.

Apollo 8 was the first manned mission to leave Earth orbit and fly to the moon, orbiting it on Christmas Eve 1968. The crew broadcast back live TV views of the lunar surface from close up. If you were a young space fan at the time, it was tremendously exciting and felt like an epochal moment in history. …

After my myeloma diagnosis in early March 2006, I received induction therapy with thalido­mide (Thalomid) and dexa­metha­sone (Decadron), which lasted for eight months. At the time, this treat­ment regimen had just been approved for newly diag­nosed myeloma patients. As I’m sure you all know, the regimen is now essentially obsolete, which is a good measure of the recent progress in myeloma treat­ment!

After diagnosis, I took a term of sick leave from my university, and spent virtually my …

Two subjects that I seem to spend a lot of time think­ing about these days are multiple myeloma and rocket science. This is not all that surprising really, as I was a university professor of aero­space en­gi­neer­ing, teach­ing subjects that could loosely be termed “rocket science,” when I was diag­nosed with myeloma in 2006.

It was in the late spring of 2005 that I experienced what was probably, in retro­spect, the first sign that something was wrong with my …