Results of a recent retrospective study conducted at the Mayo Clinic in­di­cate that the survival of patients with non­se­cre­tory multiple myeloma has improved over the last decade.

Nonse­cre­tory multiple myeloma is a rare form of myeloma in which a patient’s disease cannot be diagnosed or tracked by the presence of monoclonal protein in the blood or urine.  This is not the case for most myeloma patients, who have “se­cre­tory” disease which can be tracked using lab results such as a …

It was appointment day, and my husband Daniel and I rode in thought­ful silence as we neared the hospital. Neither one of us felt like talk­ing, nor did we make banal chit-chat, a small com­fort from knowing one another so well. He drove more ag­gres­sive­ly than usual, dodg­ing in out of traffic like Mario Andretti in his final lap. I grasped the door handle, but I said noth­ing, which for me was not usual.

My thoughts ran to his ap­point­ment, and maybe …

When I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2005, my specialist told me that my disease fell into the category of smoldering myeloma.

This meant that, while I had abnormal myeloma cells in my bone marrow and abnormal protein in my blood, the myeloma wasn’t yet harming me. I didn’t have any other symptoms, such as anemia, bone damage, or kid­ney involvement. I’d have my blood tested every few months, but I didn’t need any treatment.

My first reaction to …

A recently published study may change the goals many myeloma special­ists use to make treatment decisions for newly diagnosed myeloma pa­tients planning on having a stem cell transplant.

The study also has potentially broader implications. Indeed, it may influ­ence ongoing debate on a fundamental controversy about how multiple myeloma, in general, should be treated.

The authors of the new study looked at data for 539 myeloma patients who failed to achieve even a partial response to their initial (induction) treat­ment regimen …

There are several analogies that are used to describe our ex­peri­ences liv­ing with multiple myeloma. The most common appear to be a battle, a jour­ney, or chap­ters in a book.

The analogy that currently resonates the most with me is the one of chap­ters in a book.

The titles of each chapter of my multiple myeloma book are pretty obvious: Diag­nosis, Radi­a­tion Treat­ment, Watch and Wait, Induction Ther­apy, and Autol­o­gous Stem Cell Trans­plant. The next chapter of my book will …

One of my many niche skills is that I know how to design, plan, and draft the legal foundation – motions, rules, procedures, and manuals – of what we in Ohio call "specialized dockets."

A specialized docket is also called a treatment court. There are different kinds of specialized dockets, each of which focuses on one class of offenders who all share a non-criminal trait that causes them to break the law.

Overall, these special courts are intended to offer "a therapeutically …

I would like to address a topic that almost all of us with multiple myeloma have to deal with at one point or another – when to get a stem cell trans­plant.

Many of you reading this have been through this procedure already. It is often prescribed soon after diagnosis for patients with advanced myeloma. Most of these folks didn’t have much choice in the matter; it was something that needed to be done urgently to give them the best …