A hard-as-nails buddy once asked me: ‘How can you be so brave going through this myeloma crud?’

I’m brave? Not hardly. He wasn’t there on this day:

It was in the spring six years ago that I was having trouble getting com­fort­able in the well-worn recliner in the tiny one-bedroom apartment that I had rented in Little Rock.

As I leaned over to grab something off of an end table, I felt a ‘crunch’ in my side. I moaned and froze, almost afraid to breathe because it might make the pain worse.

In the good old ‘pre-myeloma’ days, I would have been worried about such a thing happening, but breaking a rib while sitting in an easy chair had oddly become par for the course.

At that point, I had been away from my Missouri home for three months and had crawled my way through two rounds of rather aggressive induction therapy and was doing my best to recover from an autologous stem cell transplant.

To prepare for the transplant, I had been given a high dose of melphalan (Alkeran), which was designed to annihilate more cancerous myeloma cells than conventional rounds of treatment could do.

Unfortunately, the chemical blitzkrieg also whacked my blood stem cells and a bunch of other friendly, mature, necessary-to-live cells residing in my bone marrow.

To rescue me, shortly after my first induction therapy, the medical team had harvested 24 million of my blood stem cells and then cryo­genically stored them. At the transplant, they thawed six million of those frosty rascals and reintroduced them back into my blood stream.

We waited for the prodigal stem cells to repopulate colonies of new blood cells in the marrow. We also prayed that no myeloma cells had eluded the trap.

Although the transplant process itself was performed without complication, I was left nauseated and way beyond exhausted.

I waged a daily war of wills against bottles of Ensure, cups of water, peach slices, and countless pills that I didn’t think that I’d be able get down, let alone keep down.

A fever – too low to send me to the germy emergency room and too high to make me feel anything but crummy – was accompanied by a pesky cough and relentless bouts of hiccups, both of which agitated my other broken ribs and fractured vertebrae.

My friends back home would rightfully describe me as being as sick as a dog.

Thankfully, I wasn’t left alone. My wife had been splitting her time with me in Arkansas and with our two daughters back home. A revolving door of family and friends from all over the place generously took turns spelling Karen in one place or the other and by coming out to care for me.

Through it all, I was determined not to show any fear. It was already hard enough on my family and friends, and I didn’t want to worry them even more by my falling apart. I needed to be stoic and strong for them and for my pride. No excuses.

Then the phone call came.

As I sat in the recliner a week after the transplant, my wife walked into the room to tell me the sad news that our dog Ruffie had died that morning. Karen knew that there were very few things in life that I loved more than my dogs.

A couple of years before my diagnosis, some partners of mine and I were buying a small recording studio and, as we were inspecting the building with the previous owners, I noticed something odd under the porch.

Peering out from beneath the steps was a dog sticking its pink tongue out at me. She had the gray, black, and white broad coat colors of a Border Collie. To the owners’ amazement, I was able to coax her out with a piece of a sandwich and some water. Apparently Ruffie, as they called her, hadn’t trusted anyone enough to let them get within arm’s length.

I was shocked to see her matted fur and wobbly gait. The story was that she had been run off by a local farmer for ‘getting into the chickens,’ and that she’d been roaming around the area for years, living on scraps. Nobody wanted her.

I ended up taking Ruffie to my veterinarian, who discovered that she had teeth missing, an eye infection, was nearly deaf, had worms, and was malnourished. He told me that she probably had 15 or so hard years behind her and not much time ahead of her.

She was a sick dog. But she was a survivor.

The vet said that Ruffie wasn’t in any great pain, but asked if I wanted to put her down. I wasn’t going to let her live out her days unwanted or unloved, so we patched her up and Ruffie soon went home with us.

The studio owner had said that Ruffie would never go inside, and that I should expect the same from her. To my surprise, when we arrived home, Ruffie hobbled right into the house and plodded around after me before ducking into a walk-in closet, where she promptly fell asleep.

When she awoke, Ruffie passively greeted the other dogs, ate a bit of food, lapped up some water, and then followed them out of the doggie door to discover her new world in the fenced-in backyard.

She became part of the family. In all the time that we had her, I never heard her bark at anything or fight with the other dogs or be anything but pleasant. She shook when storms raged and huddled close by.

As Ruffie visibly got older, she spent most of her days strolling in the yard or sleeping in the closet with her pink tongue sticking out of her toothless mouth.

It was a whirlwind when I first got sick, and before we left for Arkansas, I said goodbye to my kids and then to my three pups. Ruffie came up to me last and gave me a little lick, a weak whimper, and a soft, high-pitched bark. ‘She barks!’ we all shouted in unison.

After Karen told me about Ruffie’ passing that day, she left to go to the airport to pick up my brother-in-law, who would be staying with me for the next week.

As the door closed behind her, unexpected tears began to fall. Although I knew that we had given Ruffie a much better life, I was sad that I couldn’t be with her at the end. I was going to miss her.

To that day in my myeloma journey, I hadn’t shed a single tear, and all of a sudden I couldn’t hold them back. Like a well primed pump, the tears just kept coming.

Maybe it was the medicine that I was on or that I hadn’t slept well in weeks, I tried to tell myself. Nah, that wasn’t it.

I was crying because I had cancer, and I was under a lot of pressure. I missed my kids, and I missed my dogs and my work, and I was stuck in a lousy apartment hours from home. I was crying for the trouble and worry that I’d caused those who loved me, and I felt guilty about it. I was crying because I was hurting and tired and afraid. I was crying because my life had fallen apart. I was crying because my silly old dog died.

I wasn’t ready to show my newfound enlightenment to the world, so I pulled myself together before my wife came back from the airport.

But maybe the experts were right. Perhaps bravery is sometimes about letting go and feeling vulnerable and being okay with it and pressing on anyway.

My problems hadn’t changed, I knew that even rougher ones were sure to come down the pike, but somehow I felt better giving in to the tears.

I suppose that a therapist could have taught me that releasing my emotions would be good for my soul and for my health. But thank God that a little pink-tongued mess of a sweet Border Collie took me down that road first.