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 in two chairs in front of him.

Doctor: You have multiple myeloma.

Me (mumbling): I’ve heard of that.

Doctor: You can learn more about it on the Internet.

Then Linda left the room while he did a bone marrow biopsy/aspiration.

Truly, that’s pretty much all I remember.

To be fair, Linda says there wasn’t a whole lot of discussion at this appointment. She says her reaction when he used the term myeloma was to exclaim, “What in God’s name is that?” She says he gave us a quick rundown and talked only briefly about treatment, saying that would be decided at our next appointment in a couple of days. Maybe we talked about second opinions.

But, it’s like I wasn’t there. The part of my brain that was supposed to be engaged in this discussion just wasn’t functioning right.

Having spent many months before my diagnosis in a downward spiral health-wise, and not having any idea what was wrong, now that someone had put a name on it, my brain refused to process it.

Although having heard the term multiple myeloma somewhere along the way, I had no idea what it was. At first, when he said it, I wasn’t even sure it was cancer. I don’t think he ever even used the word “cancer” in describing what I had. In fact, now that I think about it, most of my doctors since don’t bandy about the C-word much, if at all. More often, it’s “your disease.” At my diagnosis, though, I think it might have helped my short-circuited brain if he’d said, “You have a rare cancer. It’s called multiple myeloma.”

Getting a cancer diagnosis is a defining moment in one’s life. And my memory of the event is rather ill-defined.

At my diagnosis appointment, my brain was out to lunch. It went “La-dee-da-dee-da-dee-da-I’m-not-going-to-listen-to-this,” over and over again, with its hands over its ears or whatever a brain does to drown out what’s going on around it.

The rational part of me wanted to know, but an irrational part was clinging to immortality and would not accept that there was something seriously wrong with me.

When I’d gotten the call earlier to come in to this doctor, I’d told Linda that I would go alone.

She said, simply and emphatically, “No you’re not.”

I can’t imagine what it would’ve been like without her there because I seem to recall she did all the talking. I can’t say for sure that I asked one single question. I don’t think I did. I just stared blankly – disconnectedly. You might think that I was in shock, but that would be giving me too much credit on the awareness scale.

If I’d gone alone, my retelling of the experience of the appointment when I got back home would have been just slightly better than incoherent. Perhaps like this:

Linda: What did he say?

Me: He says I have something. I think he said it’s called multiple myeloma. I’m not sure what it is. He said to look it up on the Internet. I think it might be cancer, but I’m not sure. He said I need some kind of treatment. Oh, and he stuck this big needle into the bone marrow in my hip and sucked a bunch of stuff out. It was unpleasant and painful, and I’d rather not ever do that again. I have to go back in a couple of days when he gets the result to talk about treatment. Oh, you know, I think he mentioned thalidomide. And steroids.

That would be about it.

Recently, we were out to dinner with some friends, one of whom gave me the “Twenty Questions” routine about my cancer.

He asked me some things no one else had previously asked about the run-up to my diagnosis. Such as, did I suspect that there was something seriously wrong with me? Did I at any time consider that I might have cancer? Was I in denial?

Well, the answer to all those questions is pretty much, no.

Part of the reason, though, was that I was regularly seeing my primary care physician during my slow deterioration. However, I didn’t know he really wasn’t doing a good job at investigating. Let’s just say that he never saw anything alarming in what I was going through. So neither did I.

His efforts to find out what was wrong over several months seem, in retrospect, half-hearted and probably contributed to my presenting at Stage 3 by the time my cancer was diagnosed.

My first real clue that there might be something seriously wrong with me was by way of self-diagnosis, when I began to suspect that there was something amiss with my kidney functioning. The thing is, for a guy it’s often easy to spot possible proteinuria (that’s a medical term that loosely means “bubbly pee”), which indicates there’s excess protein in your urine. There’s supposed to be little, if any at all.

It wasn’t until my kidneys started to fail that it was clear to me that I was in a serious health care crisis.

Even then, it took Linda’s intervention to get me speedily to the right doctor, for I had obviously failed miserably at the task.

Which brings me to the point that those of us with cancer really can benefit from having an advocate to help us through the turmoil of diagnosis and treatment.

You really shouldn’t leave home without one.