It has been a very cold winter here in Calgary since the end of this January. Having arctic tem­per­a­tures of below -4 degrees Fahrenheit (-20 degrees Celsius) for many days in a row has been stressful for people and for wild­life. We people can bundle up in our parkas, boots, and down mitts to get outdoors for a walk on a sunny day. We can also drive to a shopping mall to walk around there, or go to the gym for an indoor work­out. My husband and I have been doing all of these activities in these arctic tem­per­a­tures.

The outdoor wild­life, on the other hand, is mostly hard hit by the arctic tem­per­a­tures. At least there is a lot of snow on the ground, and smaller bur­row­ing animals can shelter underneath it. We see lots of rabbits hopping about, but I haven’t seen any of the deer, bob­cats, porcu­pines, or even many squirrels lately that we saw last autumn. What we have seen is a pack of coyotes that has a den some­where in the woods behind our street. It is indeed startling to see six of them running along, looking healthy and with fluffy coats! They seem to thrive in winter, but I hope that they disappear back into the woods come spring!

The wild­life seem to simply survive from one season to the next, but we people have the capability of thinking a lot about our lives. What happens psychologically when a cancer patient goes through a period of panic and the need to fight hard for survival, and then gets into a phase of being well again? In the case of multiple myeloma, one can never be 100 per­cent sure that this disease will not attack us again, since it is con­sidered to be ‘treatable but not curable.’ All of us in the myeloma com­munity are hoping that eventually a remission will be just that, and a relapse will not be just around the next corner.

You would think that after a period of ten years, one shouldn’t have to worry about fighting hard against myeloma again. However, in my case, I am still being monitored regularly and may well have to start treat­ment again. I had actually stopped my treat­ments in January, three cycles after starting treat­ment again, since at that time I had a low level of disease and the side effects of my Revlimid (lena­lido­mide) and dexa­meth­a­sone treat­ment were somewhat dif­fi­cult for me to man­age. So now I am left wondering how long it will take for me to relapse again and start treat­ment. At least there are more treat­ments avail­able now than there were a decade ago!

I am mostly living an everyday life that involves time with my family (I am a grandmother of four young boys now), my work with my husband, and my hobbies. My hobbies in­clude singing, reading, and making crafts. I also try to stay fit by walking and going to a gym.

Despite my somewhat carefree life at the moment, two imaginary animals have been accompanying me on my myeloma journey: the "elephant in the room" and the "invisible gorilla."

An "elephant in the room" refers to a sig­nif­i­cant problem that no one wants to discuss. It is a form of thought repression. Ten years ago, I had a dif­fi­cult time to not speak of my myeloma. It was so new to me, plus I was in a lot of pain from vertebral fractures and also suffering from an overload of can­cer­ous plasma cells. My family and friends gathered round to encourage me and to help me through this crisis. Gradually I realized that I could not talk about multiple myeloma all of the time, and we talked of other matters too. The myeloma was still there in my mind at least, but was relegated to being an elephant in the room. Then as the years went on, I met other people through my social groups; most of them did not know of my health history. I talked less and less about the myeloma, and since I usually felt quite well too, did not need to. Meanwhile, I had a sec­ond­ary cancer, and after a while of talking about that, I think it became a second elephant.

Last fall, I went to a talk about psychology and saw a video clip called the ‘Invisible Gorilla,’ created by two psychologists, Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. In the video clip, two teams of basketball players, dressed in white and black t-shirts, were passing balls back and forth. The chal­lenge was to count how many times the ball was passed by one of the teams. What was a surprise in the video was that a woman dressed up in a gorilla suit strolled through the whole scene. It turned out that at least 40 per­cent of the viewing audience (including me) did not notice the gorilla. These people were so focused on the ball game that a really large intrusion did not register with their brain. The "Invisible Gorilla" is now also a metaphor for being so caught up in some­thing that one does not notice some­thing really glaringly obvious and possibly very important.

In our lives, there are so many important things to attend to, and any of us could miss some­thing that turns out to be very important later, such as a sign of an oncoming disease. It happened to me in 2009 when I had a lot of back pain for months before I had vertebral fractures, which led up to my multiple myeloma diag­nosis.

Now I am aware of the myeloma, as are my doctors, and it is well monitored. So it is not an "invisible gorilla" to me any more, although others might be surprised to learn that my remission may well be only temporary.

So, in between studying nature in the winter, and thinking about metaphorical animals, I have a real menagerie! I think I will take a trip to the zoo in the near future and visit the gorillas and other inter­est­ing animals. Unfortunately, the elephants at the Calgary Zoo were moved to another zoo a few years ago.

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The quotation for this month is from Lyall Watson (1939-2008), a South African botanist, zoologist, and biologist, who said: "If elephants didn’t exist, you couldn’t invent one. They belong to a small group of living things so unlikely they chal­lenge credulity and common sense."