My mother, at age 83, dressed up to go to the grocery store. She chose her tops with an eye for a bright color, such as tangerine orange or scarlet red, to contrast with her black trousers. Her everyday jewelry was beautiful south­western tur­quoise and silver. She applied her makeup behind closed doors, to not give any secrets away.

In her 80’s, Mom was tiny, only 4 foot 10 inches (1.47 m), yet she walked tall with her head up high. …

I received an autologous stem cell trans­plant in July 2016. I chronicled the day-to-day progress of my trans­plant in the Beacon’s forums, so I won’t repeat that account here. Instead, I’ll share some of my general thoughts and feel­ings about the process.

My stem cell transplant was performed outpatient, but because we live over an hour away from the clinic, we relocated to apartments reserved for transplant patients. …

When we multiple myeloma sufferers were first diagnosed, we all heard from our doctor something like this: “You have multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer that is incurable but treatable.”

And so the waiting and fretting began.

No matter what type of frontline treatment we chose, the questions that we had were all the same.

Will it work?

How long will it take to see results?

Can I achieve a partial, or a very good partial, or even a …

I have been on Pomalyst (pomalidomide), plus Kyprolis (carfilzomib) and dexa­meth­a­sone (Decadron), since this past July. It has been an inter­est­ing journey, to say the least.

Like Revlimid (lenalidomide) before it, Pomalyst showered me with lots of side effects, ranging from a bright red rash the first cycle, to peeling face and scalp, to extreme cold chills in the middle of the night, to hands shaking so violently that I could not take a picture and get a crisp …

As the 2016 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. It also …

I was busy multi-tasking a couple of days ago. Well, I wasn’t actually busy busy. And maybe multi-tasking is a bit of an overstatement. Anyway, this is what happened:

I was drinking coffee AND watching tele­vision AND surfing the internet. Oh, and I was eating a Christmas sugar cookie that my daughter had just baked. Now if that’s not multi-tasking, I don’t know what is, right?

Let me start over.

At the very moment I was reading the word …

Many people think of “It’s a Wonderful Life” as the most archetypal Christ­mas film. For me, however, the best holiday film is “A Christmas Carol,” and not just any version, but the 1951 one starring Alastair Sim.

Sim was in many famous British films from this period, and was quite an actor. His interaction as Scrooge with a boy outside, below his window, on Christmas morning is something that I could watch year after year. In fact, I do. …