I am writing today under the old adage of “misery loves company.” I don’t want you to be mis­er­a­ble, but I just need to share with some­body who understands.

For those of you currently enduring severe myeloma symp­toms or treat­ment side effects, please for­give me for sounding like a spoiled brat. How­ever, there are many of us who ex­per­i­ence myeloma like a dull constant head­ache, rather than a migraine. And that constant ache is a hassle (al­though I’m sure those …

It’s been 37 long, hard days away from home for my salvage transplant. The good news: I’m home early!

I left last week facing a very difficult decision: Should I take my specialist’s advice and move forward with a second, tandem, stem cell transplant?

My doctor felt if the first one didn’t work, well, skip the second transplant. But if the one I just had got most, or all, of my myeloma, crush it with a second transplant.

“Don’t make …

No two ways about it. I wasn’t smiling.

You’d think that, after having endured the kind of challenges that we multiple myeloma patients face during our illnesses, I would have learned not to sweat the little inconveniences that life seems to relish throwing my way.

You’d think that, but I can recall an out-of-state trip for a myeloma checkup five years ago during which I greatly overestimated my ability to ‘go with the flow.’

On the busy first day of …

Let me get this out of the way right at the outset: I am a for­tu­nate person.

It is true that I have an incurable cancer. At the time of my initial diag­nosis, I was suffering from pretty significant bone pain, especially in my ribs. And during the six months of my induction treat­ment, I dealt with some un­pleas­ant side effects, especially the crazi­ness and sleep­less­ness caused by dexamethasone (Dec­a­dron).

I went through a stem cell transplant, which …

Last week my husband Daniel and I returned home after his regular ap­point­ment with his myeloma specialist. As we collapsed into the couch, we began our de­compression ritual of channel surfing and I caught one of my favorite movies: A River Runs Through It.

The movie is about Norman Maclean and his free-spirited brother Paul, who grow up in rural Montana in the 1920s. Their father, a Presbyterian minister, believed “that there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing,” and …

The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting in any given year is hit-or-miss as far as breaking research for multiple myeloma goes.

However, at ASCO 2015, there were no two views among myeloma experts. It was probably one of the most sig­nif­i­cant ASCO meetings as far as pre­senta­tions of abstracts that have the poten­tial to alter the land­scape of myeloma treat­ment in the near future.

There is no way to do justice to all the presentations at ASCO …

Earlier this week, Bristol-Myers Squibb an­nounced that it had filed an appli­ca­tion to have elotuzumab approved in Europe as a new treat­ment for mul­ti­ple mye­lo­ma patients who have re­ceived one or more prior ther­a­pies (see re­lated Bristol-Myers press re­lease).

An im­por­tant part of elotuzumab’s Euro­pean ap­prov­al appli­ca­tion will be ef­fi­cacy and safety data from a Phase 3 clin­i­cal trial known as ELOQUENT-2. These re­sults drew sig­nif­i­cant attention when they were pre­sented at …