“Oops.”

It wasn’t until the radiology nurse finishing taping down the IV line she had just inserted in my arm that I remembered my husband Warren was sitting in the room with me.

I looked over at Warren. “Sorry.”

He shook his head. “It’s okay. I just looked away.”

My husband is not comfortable with medical procedures, to put it mildly. But there he was, sitting in the room with me while the nurse prepared me for a bone marrow biopsy.

This past January was the first time I’ve had a bone marrow biopsy where the person waiting for me to come out was my husband and not my dad. It was my husband in the prelim room with me listening to the doctor’s explanation of the procedure, it was my husband sitting in the waiting room, it was my husband standing by my bed in recovery, and it was my husband who carefully drove me home and made sure I ate before I fell asleep.

What a change from when I was first diagnosed some nine plus years ago.

When I was diagnosed with myeloma, I was recently divorced. A new long-distance relationship took what turned out to be a mortal wound when the response to my illness was “I didn’t sign on to be a nurse.”

Ouch. I took that statement to heart. Clearly, my myeloma made me undesirable as half of a pair in a mean­ingful, loving relationship. I might have close friends, but a long-term, committed partnership was off the table.

So I did it by myself. Don’t get me wrong. I had a supportive family and a circle of close friends who sur­rounded me and helped me. But at the end of the day, it was just me. I went to my oncologist by myself, I took the meds by myself, I dealt with the myeloma by myself. I woke up at three a.m. by myself wondering if I would live long enough to see my younger son graduate from high school. And that was okay because that’s just the way my life was going to be from there on out.

And then there was Warren.

Warren was a long-time friend, so he knew of the myeloma before we started seeing one another. I was in remission at the time and seeing my oncologist only quarterly. Early on, we had a long, serious discussion about my diagnosis, the prognoses, my close relationship with the oncology world, and death. In short, we discussed my life in Cancerland, because I wanted Warren to know what the road looked like at the time and what it could look like later on.

Warren didn’t flinch.

My remission continued for a long time. My myeloma and I slowly, slowly drifted along. I relapsed for the first time in 2012, requiring me to take Velcade ^[1] (bortezomib) for five months, but it was not too serious.

My recent relapse, slowly building speed over the fall, has been a little more intense. I have watched Warren watching me, the worry lining his eyes; I have listened to his questions to my oncologist as we discussed treatment with Revlimid ^[2] (lenalidomide), which I started at the beginning of this month.

It is an entirely different experience to be ill with an actively involved, caring partner. There is someone to sit at the oncology appointment with me, someone to say “let me do that” when the laundry basket gets too heavy, someone to massage my feet when the neuropathy flares, someone to hold me at three a.m. when I wake up and need to talk about dying.

In this month of lacy hearts and cupids, my biggest Valentine is the one who looked away when the IV needle went in, then crossed the room to give me a kiss.