Myeloma Rocket Scientist: Reflections On Harold Macmillan And Multiple Myeloma
We are now in the centenary of the Battle of the Somme, one of the largest battles of the First World War fought by the armies of the British and French empires against the German Empire.
For that reason, I have been re-reading Somme: The Heroism and Horror of War by Martin Gilbert. It is striking how many men who became well known in later life served at the Somme, for instance J. R. R. Tolkien and the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. Some of these veterans suffered long-lasting effects from their time there.
One such individual is my motivation for writing this column. Something that he said about his experiences when injured seemed to resonate with my experiences as a multiple myeloma survivor. Perhaps this is just because I think about myeloma too much, and so see connections to it all over the place, I’m not sure.
The person in question is Harold Macmillan, who served as an officer in the elite British army unit the Grenadier Guards. Macmillan later became British Prime Minister, from 1957 to 1963. (It always surprises me that two of the quintessentially English figures of 20th Century politics, Macmillan and Winston Churchill, were actually half-American, since their mothers were from the United States.) Macmillan was severely injured in the hip at the Somme in September 1916. He was on crutches for four years, and was left with a shuffling walk for the rest of his life.
After retiring from active politics, Macmillan became Chancellor of Oxford University for many years. The Chancellor of a British university is something of a ceremonial position, usually held by a celebrity of some sort. I saw him only once when I was an undergraduate at Oxford. He was escorting Queen Elizabeth while she was on a visit to the university. After their official dinner that evening, the two walked around the quadrangle of my college, and we students stood and applauded them as they did so. It somehow seemed a bit strange to clap people just for walking a few hundred yards, but that’s what we all did.
I experience flashbacks to that evening every year when I attend a local cancer fundraising event. The survivors make one circuit of the track before the teams start their all-night fundraising laps. The volunteers applaud us as we make our single lap, which reminds me vividly every time of how we applauded the Queen and Macmillan all those years ago.
The main reason, however, I think of Macmillan in connection with cancer and multiple myeloma is something that he said about his experiences at the Somme. Of course, the context is very different, but the underlying idea resonated with me.
When he was injured, he lay in pain in a shell hole in no-man’s land through much of that day. He spent that time reading his pocket edition of a play by Aeschylus in the original Greek. Finally, when darkness had fallen, it was safe for stretcher-bearers to come out and take him and other injured soldiers away to a field hospital. On the way there, the confusion produced by darkness and artillery shelling led to him somehow becoming separated, fortunately in relative safety, from his companions.
Reflecting later on his experiences, Macmillan compared what it was like being with others and then being alone as follows:
“Bravery is not really vanity, but a kind of concealed pride, because everybody is watching you. Then I was safe, but alone, and absolutely terrified because there was no need to show off anymore, no need to pretend … suddenly there was nobody there … you could cry if you wanted to.”
I was very interested to find this quote, as it fits with some observations I have made over the years about coping with multiple myeloma.
I don’t think that I am an immensely proud person, but I definitely hope to behave in such a way that people don’t think that I’m making an undue fuss over things. I try not to use the old song title “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me” as my template! In very different circumstances, Macmillan obviously felt much the same. Maintaining a brave face in front of others can, I think, help you to stay a bit more positive about things. (Of course, it could be argued that writing a column where you complain about your experiences with dexamethasone and so on is perhaps not fully compatible with maintaining a stiff upper lip in public!)
Conversely, when alone, things can start to look blacker. Thus, when Macmillan became separated from the others, he for the first time felt truly terrified, even though he was in a much safer location than he had been earlier in the day. In our case, on a day when, for instance, bad test results come in, it can be much harder to stay brave about the situation if you are on your own. I am fortunate that I am not having to deal with myeloma alone. That must make an already difficult experience even harder to cope with.
Of course, everyone deals with things in their own way. As we used to say back when I taught spacecraft design, “There is no single right answer.” That is why the U. S. Mercury and Soviet Vostok spacecraft look completely different, even though they were both solutions to the same problem: “Design a spacecraft to take a person into orbit and return them safely to the Earth.” So, many survivors may not agree about the benefits of having people around to stay brave in front of. And, of course, it can definitely be therapeutic to have the occasional moan with your “inner circle.” No one can be brave all of the time.
Despite these caveats, though, I would guess that Macmillan’s words will resonate with many myeloma patients.
Trevor Williams is a multiple myeloma patient and columnist at The Myeloma Beacon. You can view a list of his columns here.
If you are interested in writing a regular column for The Myeloma Beacon, please contact the Beacon team at .
Thanks for this interesting column, Trevor! 'The Battle of the Somme' is also the name of a pipe band tune that I played with my pipe band. My father has told me that after his father, a private in World War I, had a head injury and was discharged in 1915, he always felt that he could be quite cheerful. He had had a close call, not only with the injury, but also from the fact that many of those who carried on in his unit, did not survive the war. I try to feel that way about the myeloma diagnosis, that it was a close call. I was fortunate to get the help I needed, and try to be cheerful now too.
I admire Queen Elizabeth, and it is nice that she reached her 90th birthday this year.
Thank you, Trevor, for your column. Thank you for the information and quotation by MacMillan. I see he was not afraid to acknowledge his fear and despair as a young soldier at such a terrible time in the Somme in 1916. But he went on to become a world leader. What I really like about the quotation is that MacMillan was not afraid to acknowledge his fear and despair yet he didn't "stay there." I believe that there is, indeed, relevance from MacMillan's experience.
Trevor:
You say: "I definitely hope to behave in such a way that people don’t think that I’m making an undue fuss over things. I try not to use the old song title “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me” as my template!"
This raises a question that comes up for me fairly often as well. When you are interacting with other people, what do you actually tell them: (1) basically everything is fine with me, or (2) I have an incurable cancer that I expect to die from within a few years, or (3) something in between.
I think that the difficulty arises because on the one hand having myeloma does not really make us different from others – we all are going to die, we don't know when exactly, we get worried when we get bad health news, etc.
The difficulty arises, I think, because myeloma patients don't fit into a category that people are familiar with. While it is not unusual to find people with a life expectancy of a handful of years, normally those people are either in their mid-80s or they are younger but obviously quite sick. By contrast, a myeloma patient can seem quite young and healthy, which seems inconsistent with a short life expectancy, unless you understand fairly well the course of this disease.
One could of course try to start explaining all about myeloma, but people don't necessarily want to hear all the details, unless they are myeloma patients. Maybe this is why support groups are a good thing; at least there you have a group that is interested in talking about the myeloma disease course. But when you are talking to the average person who is not a myeloma patient, it is difficult for them to understand. If you tell them you have cancer, and your otherwise robust appearance is deceptive, then they want to know whether your are finished with chemotherapy and therefore cured, or perhaps still under treatment and not cured yet. If you tell them that you will probably never be cured, that may be difficult to process. Put on top of that the caveat that "Well, there is an outside chance that I will be in time for a clinical trial that will cure me, but I don't know what the chances of that are," and they get thoroughly confused. There is fundamentally so much uncertainty in the course of the disease for many of us that it is difficult to summarize how one really is doing vis-a-vis the disease.
So to get back to your quote: Are you making too much fuss or putting too brave a face on it? Who knows? To some extent, I've just stopped worrying about this. When someone greets me with "You're looking good!" I often just sigh, and as often as not just let the remark go (with its implicit – "and therefore you are healthy").
Trevor - Another great column. I think your answer to your colleagues who were designing spacecraft, "There is no right answer", really is the best description of how to respond to those who inquire about how we are doing. Except for those who truly understand my situation and the disease, which is a very small number, I simply respond "I'm doing OK" and change the subject.
Victor - Your comments on Trevor's column are so insightful into the whole issue that Trevor raises. Your thoughts are exactly how I feel on an almost daily basis.
Trevor - Thanks for a great column and an informative history lesson. I am a caregiver for my husband with multiple myeloma. He is not alone in this myeloma journey, but I sense there are times when he feels alone and he no longer feels brave. When the adverse side effects of the chemotherapy, radiation, or dexamethasone confine him to his hospital bed or our home, whatever the case may be, I can see that he might just want to cry. Your remarks about MacMillan's experience and his thoughts really resonate with me and probably others on this journey. Thanks for sharing.
Nancy, thanks very much for the reference to the song “The Battle of the Somme.” I had never heard of it before. It’s hard to imagine anything as pleasing as that coming out of the horrific conditions of the trenches and mud of the Somme. I especially like the bagpipe version, as I am for some reason very fond of bagpipes. A piper played the lament “The Mist-Covered Mountains” at Neil Armstrong’s memorial service at the National Cathedral: it was very moving.
That’s a good point about the close calls that both you and your father had! And, as you mentioned, the Queen has not only reached 90 but is now the longest-lived and longest-reigning British monarch. Quite an impressive record!
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