I grew up with my four siblings in a home full of laughter, fun, and hijinks. Most of the hilarity was com­pli­ments of our dad. He was a larger-than-life character loved by throngs.  His jokes, his pranks, the funny songs he would create on the spur of the moment, and his story-telling kept us all laughing.  We all looked for­ward to supper time (yes, “supper”;  I’m from New England), because we knew it would be a whole lot of fun. Some­times it was hard to eat because we were laughing so hard.

I was diag­nosed with mono­clonal gam­mop­athy of undetermined sig­nif­i­cance (MGUS) in 2014 when my pri­mary care doctor was checking my thyroid and decided to “throw in one other test.” “Don’t worry,” she said as she was ex­plaining the diag­nosis to me, her stunned patient, “it’s a benign con­di­tion; only a very small fraction of people diag­nosed with MGUS progress to mul­ti­ple myeloma.”

And she was right. It was benign. That is, until it wasn’t.

That diag­nosis of MGUS led to a lot of studying and reading about myeloma and to reg­u­lar blood tests, first every six months, then every four,  then two, and then every month as my lambda free light chain num­ber went higher and higher. At the beginning of Feb­ru­ary, 2018 my first bone mar­row biopsy con­firmed I had mul­ti­ple myeloma, that 60 per­cent of the myeloma cells were aggressive, and that I had at least one high-risk factor.

OK. So I have mul­ti­ple myeloma. Is it chal­leng­ing to have mul­ti­ple myeloma? Of course. I have short­ness of breath walking up any tiny grade. The spectacular high and then the just-as- spectacular crashing that I ex­peri­ence from dexa­meth­a­sone are worthy of being Olympic events. (One friend, also a cancer fighter, sug­gested I could open a cleaning service for the “high days” and call it Marilyn’s “Speed” Cleaning.) Being dizzy has taken on a whole new meaning. Waiting for lab re­­sults is not my idea of a good time.

Managing it all takes some effort, but I decided early on that it doesn’t have to define or consume every min­ute, or even most, of my life. I don’t know how long I will live, but, then, I didn’t know that before my diag­nosis either. What is most im­por­tant to me is not that I have myeloma or that I don’t know how long I will live or that I have some unwanted and dif­fi­cult side effects or that lab re­­sults might tell me some­thing I don’t want to hear or that I have to change treat­ment protocols. What counts most to me is that I still mat­ter to the same people I mat­tered to pre-diagnosis, and I’m still im­por­tant in their lives. And that goes both ways.

I’m 81 years old, I’m a retired college pro­fessor, I have mul­ti­ple myeloma, and I live alone, but none of these separately or all to­geth­er define who I am. Myeloma isn’t me; I am not myeloma. Myeloma is just a new, added dimension of the same old me. Myeloma isn’t funny, but having it doesn’t mean I can’t laugh or have fun. I still love to laugh and have fun, just as I did in my grow­ing-up home. Some­times, I even make other people laugh.

There are plenty of sources that tell us that laughter has great powers. It can reduce pain, im­prove oxygen flow to the heart and brain, lower blood sugar levels, and alleviate mental stress. It’s magical.

Norman Cousins, in his book Anatomy of an Illness, recounts how he watched Marx Brothers films every night to help elim­i­nate his extraordinary pain caused by ankylosing spondylitis, a painful, de­gen­er­a­tive, and supposedly irreversible dis­ease. Ten min­utes of laughter a night bought him two pain-free hours, and, among other measures, that laughter helped him to recover.

We all respond and adapt to mul­ti­ple myeloma and all it brings in dif­fer­en­t ways. To main­tain as much good health as possible, sev­er­al months ago I set a goal for myself that I would walk a half marathon a week. That would be approx­i­mately two miles (3.2 kilometers) a day. Some­times I make it, some­times I don’t. I always try. But walking in a city in the middle of a pan­dem­ic is a treacherous un­der­­tak­ing, to say the least, for anyone with a compromised im­mune sys­tem.

But there is some­thing I can do that is safe, great exercise, and has amazing ben­e­fits. I can always – Every. Single. Day. – find time to laugh for at least 15 min­utes, and often for much longer than that, whether it’s sustained in one event or spread out over the day. For me, that daily dose of laughter, for how­ever long, is even more im­por­tant for my well-being than 20 or 30 min­utes of ordinary and even safe exercise, and way, way easier.

My grow­ing-up years are serv­ing me well, and it’s a free prescription.