We live in a world today where everything is “on-demand.” We have television apps that show movies anytime we want to see them. We carry hand-held computers that can answer our every query while making an overseas call. Services exist to deliver anything we want at any hour, and we can even pay our bills while in the comfort of our living rooms.

Amidst all this “on-demand” life, it’s difficult for people to understand why they can’t do more for my husband Daniel’s smoldering myeloma. Well-meaning people look at me quizzically as they ask about his condition. I can see the doubts in their eyes, and the questions that follow – voiced and unvoiced - asking things like, “So, you mean they haven’t started treatment yet? It’s been several years, right? And it’s still growing in him? Can’t they just give him chemo or something? You know, my aunt / parent / coworker / sibling / friend had cancer and they gave him / her chemo.” I try to explain, but it’s difficult to understand – heck, I’m not even sure that I do, so I get why they’re skeptical.

We may live in an on-demand world, but multiple myeloma is not an on-demand kind of disease. The most sophisticated blood tests can’t predict everything we need to know about how to best treat this individualized disease filled with outliers and exceptions to the rule. There is no crystal ball that will give us time-to-progression statistics or overall survival data for each specific person’s case, nor do we know what drugs will best work right out of the gate for every type of multiple myeloma. In an on-demand world, we are doing the best we can with a developing knowledge base of myeloma. And because we’re still growing, we haven’t gotten it all figured out yet ... and that’s hard to accept in today’s Google-ready world of instant gratification and technological certainty.

It’s tempting to rush into action. At least then we’d be doing something, people tell me. But the more I see our good friend dealing with her lymphoma with increasingly fewer treatment options, I believe that we’re doing the right thing. She was very sick at the time of her diagnosis, and treatment was not only her only option, but it wasn’t a guarantee at all with her high-risk lymphoma. We were all encouraged by her immediate response after that first trial drug, and we were hopeful that it would keep her in remission for a very long time.

Sadly, it lasted just short of three years before she relapsed. It’s been about a year since then, and she has already gone through two more different treatments, neither of which were as effective as that first drug right out of the gate. With each new drug they are finding a shorter period of response before the next relapse, and they are running out of options for her. I read about multiple myeloma patients with similar stories as well.

Now, before the hate mail begins, I should say that I know that a short-term remission is better than no re­mission at all. I stand with our friend’s family in saying that we are very thankful to the treatments she’s had, because without them, she wouldn’t still be here. She was that sick at the time of her diagnosis.

But is anyone content with a “few years?” Especially when that someone is a young person, not even in his middle forties? I’m not content for that for Daniel. I’m not looking for the three- or the five-year remission. In fact, I’m not even looking for the ten-year return. I need so much more. We have so much more life to live together.

In my heart, I must believe that we are on the right path. I trust his myeloma specialist at MD Anderson, who tells us that the longer Daniel can hold out before treatment, the better. We’ll have better classes of drugs, and better information about which drugs work best when, when it comes time to start treatment. Every day I pray that the right myeloma drug for him will come along in time, that he will continue to “smolder” until a cure can be found.

Recently I heard a story about the famous race car driver Richard Petty. As he was preparing for his first major race, his father told him, “Win the race as slow as you can.”

That statement really resonated with me for where we are at this stage of Daniel’s smoldering myeloma.

How appropriate, I thought. Just as drivers heed the caution flag amidst the ferocity of the race, we warily approach the treatment room in the fight for survival, praying that when Daniel does enter treatment, it will be with the right drugs at the right time, and that they will grant more than just a few laps around the track.

Life may be moving at an on-demand pace, but we are focused on the only thing that matters - racing against myeloma as slowly as we can in hopes of the ultimate win.