I am about as far as anyone can be from being an expert on trees, which may make the title of this column a bit perplexing. I can tell big trees from small ones, ever­greens from deciduous, and can even identify mag­no­lias, dogwoods, and (on a good day) maples and oaks. But that’s about as far as my expertise goes.

Rockets are a different matter: I am always baffled when a film uses video of the wrong type of rocket. I cannot imagine how some­one could pos­si­bly mix up a Saturn V ^[1] and a Saturn IB ^[2], or even worse, a Titan II ^[3]!

There was an extreme case several weeks ago when a large clothing store chain wanted to hearken back to its start in 1969 by putting to­geth­er an ad that referred to the launch of Apollo 11 to the Moon that same year. How­ever, the chain in­ad­ver­tently used an image of a Space Shuttle, taken in about 1992, instead. That is a sure sign of weak rocket identi­fica­tion skills – some­thing that space geeks like me can’t quite understand.

However, when it comes to trees, my identification abilities are probably even worse than that.

Despite this shortcoming, there are some trees that I feel a rapport with that stems from my time as a myeloma patient. These are trees that keep on going despite the odds, doing their best to keep living even though things are stacked against them.

One example is something we see every spring when we go to view the cherry blossoms at the Tidal Basin in Washington. In addition to the large healthy trees covered with blooms, there are a few gnarled old ones. These sometimes are little more than large stumps, still doing their best to produce a few blossoms. I don’t think that these are from the original 1912 batch, but they have certainly made it well beyond the usual cherry tree lifespan of something like 25 to 50 years. And yet, they somehow keep on going.

I saw another example of this phenomenon that struck me even more forcefully a couple weeks ago. The route to my multiple myeloma check-ups goes through downtown Baltimore, at one point passing a derelict brick building. For some reason, there is a tree growing out of its wall about 20 feet up. I don’t know how the seed got up there, but somehow it did, and the tree has managed to continue to live, even growing to a reasonable size.

I have looked out for this tree every time I go to the hospital, and it appears to still be doing quite well. What surprised me so much on my last trip was that it was actually in blossom! I know that that’s what a tree does at this time of year, but it was very striking to see a tree in this situation just keeping on going.

Anyone with multiple myeloma, or indeed any other chronic condition (some of which can be a lot worse than myeloma), is in a somewhat similar situation to these trees. We just have to somehow keep on keeping on. Consequently, I always feel an affinity for those trees and admire their perseverance.

What makes things harder for the patient is that we have self-awareness. We know (pretty much) what is happening to us, and what is likely to happen in the future. We also know from experience if a treatment is going to make us feel ill, and yet still must make ourselves go through with it over and over if it is required for our treatment. We have to just keep on going despite the odds, since there is no way that we can go back to life as it was before myeloma.

One way of putting this is to say that there is no myeloma “reset button.” I remember seeing this term for the first time in the excellent book At the Edge of Space by Milton Thompson ^[4].

Thompson was a test pilot of the NASA/USAF rocket-powered X-15 ^[5] airplane in the 1960s, which reached speeds of over 4,500 mph (7,250 km/h) and altitudes of up to 67 miles (108 km) – high enough to briefly enter space. One of the other X-15 test pilots was Neil Armstrong. With his dry humor, Milt Thompson writes of Armstrong: “He joined the NASA astronaut corps and then I lost track of him.”

The X-15 was one of the first projects to make use of computerized flight simulators, which were key to mak­ing it possible for the pilot to learn to fly such a demanding aircraft. There was a key difference, though, between flying the real aircraft and the simulator. In the case of the real aircraft, as Thompson says, the pilot

“did not have a reset button like he had in the simulator to stop the flight and return him to the starting conditions. That is a nice button to have. If we saw that we were going to crash in the simulator, we just hit the reset button and we were back to our starting conditions. Every airplane should have a reset button.”

Every disease should have a reset button too.