I have been busy at home here with gardening, childcare, office work, and craft­ing. I nevertheless decided to make some time and read some books that I had been interested in for some time now.

I am glad that I did spend some quality time reading, in between other activities. Perhaps the fact that we are near the summer solstice now and thus have a lot of daylight makes it easier on the eyes to read! By reading just …

One of the things I do at juvenile court is facilitate a class in helping juveniles develop their aware­ness of the larger world (as opposed to being focused solely on them­selves). One exercise my colleagues and I have them do is to pay it forward: doing some act of kindness for some­one else without any expectation of reward. You don’t have to spend money, we tell them. Small acts are okay too.

It is an exercise I often carry …

Two weeks ago, I was on top of my game. I was training for a sprint triathlon, joined a masters swim team, and participating in a strength class.

A little history: I have been a participant in the Roaring Fork Women’s Tri­athlon Team for 18 years. We meet twice a week, in the summer, for coach­ing and training. For me, it is my adult summer camp. Besides, this team has been phenomenally supportive to me through the ups and downs …

April marked nine months since my autologous stem cell transplant and the beginning of another cycle of maintenance therapy.

Complete labs are drawn at the beginning of each treatment cycle. As usual, I received an email a few days later that included the latest lab results. I im­medi­ately scrolled to the bottom of the report to look at my M-spike. Instead of num­bers, this time I saw letters: “Too small to quantify.”

That was the first time since my diagnosis two …

It was February 1971, and Estelle Prather, wife of Edwin Prather, mother of two, and small business owner, was by Ed’s bedside in Houston, Texas. Earlier that year, they had left their business and children to others and made the five-hour trip to check Ed into the best cardiac hospital in the state. For weeks, a Houston hospital room was their home.

Cardiologists had found a previously undiagnosed heart murmur. With two leaves of his heart completely deteriorated and one …

I find that some days, while I don't exactly forget about multiple myeloma, I can focus on other aspects of life and feel a bit myeloma-free.

Yesterday was not one of those days.

My husband Graham and I have recently moved back home to Scotland from Singapore, where we had been living for the past two years. As I've men­tioned in previous columns, so far all my myeloma treat­ment has been under the care of a great team in Singapore. …

Randomness occurs in all aspects of life, but it sometimes seems to be particularly prevalent in multiple myeloma.

Several examples spring to mind. One is the wide variation between the behavior of the many different variants of myeloma. For no obvious reason apart from random chance, one person can have a variant that responds much better to treatment than does another.

Secondly, there is the question of the intensity of the side effects that are caused by treatment, in …