As the 2017 holiday season reaches it peak, all of us here at The Myeloma Beacon would like to thank you, our readers and members of the myeloma community worldwide, for giving us the greatest gift possible: your time.

We appreciate your coming to The Beacon and reading our articles, letting us know your thoughts about them, and sharing your experiences and helping one another in our discussion forum.

The holiday season is a time of many different traditions. …

Although we would like to think of the winter holiday season as a jolly time, filled with good cheer, for some it is not such a happy stretch of time. For those who are sick, undergoing difficult medical treatment, or in hospital, or for those who have lost a loved one in the last year, this can actually be a sad time.

Even if a person is well, just coping with the low levels of sunlight in the north, in …

Something that has intrigued me since being diagnosed with myeloma myeloma is the rather odd things that some people say to me. I always think that their intentions must be good, but from time to time I have been upset and somewhat irritated by some comments.

One of the first such incidents I can remember is when, hearing of my mis­for­tune, someone asked me, “Have you tried green juices?” I was not really sure what to say; neither "yes" …

I recently spent a few days visiting a relative in the hospital. Fortunately, all is well for her, but observing intense medical care as the visitor for a change gave me time to think about what it means to be a “good patient.”

While considering this issue and subsequently writing this column, I learned that the notion of “good” or “bad” patients is the subject of some debate and schol­ar­ship in the medical community.

For instance, in a study of …

I’m sure you have heard about the thera­peutic effects, both physical and emotional, of pets in humans. I can attest to that effect from my own personal experi­ence, especially since the time I have been dealing with multiple myeloma.

A golden doodle, which is a cross between a golden retriever and a poodle, came into our family as a puppy in 2012. This was about three years after my multiple myeloma diagnosis, so the dog did not know me when …

A very close friend of long standing recently chided me, after reading my most recent column, for being too busy and doing too much. Of course I would be fatigued if I didn’t cut back. Didn’t I understand that?

I read her letter, set it down, and sighed. “It’s not the fatigue that’s the problem,” I said to my husband, Warren.

“I know.”

But how to convey that to my friend clearly and cleanly?

I finally came up …

Two of my roles are rather heavy on acronyms: being a space engineer and a cancer patient. NASA (itself an acronym, of course) is renowned for being fond of TLAs (three-letter acronyms). Sometimes this makes sense, as it can shorten long, tech­nical terms to manage­able length. However, some­times it actually has the opposite effect; for example, the acronym for the two-syllable word "pilot" is the three-syllable PLT.

In the cancer area, terms can again be quite con­voluted, so acronyms can …