I don’t get headaches very often, but the one I was nurs­ing while curled up in a chair in the waiting room of the bone mar­row clinic was a doozy. I pulled my favorite St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap down over my eyes to shutter out the bright overhead lights.

Normally I enjoy the friendly ‘Who’s your doctor?’ and ‘Where’re y’all from?’ back-and-forth banter often heard in such gathering places, but until it was my turn up at bat in …

It’s a Tuesday evening, and I have the house all to myself.  I sit at my desk, with a generous pour of red wine, and Sara MacLachlan softly singing through the speakers. My hands are poised upon the keyboard, and I’m ready to type this month’s column.

Despite the inspiring ambience, my mind resists the usual flow of words.  I want to write something inspiring and uplifting.  But in my mind’s eye, I see numbers where the words should be.  …

OncoPep, a biotech company developing a potential therapeutic vaccine for multiple myeloma, is the Myeloma Beacon’s newest pharmaceutical industry sponsor.

OncoPep was founded in 2010 to develop novel cancer immunotherapies that stimulate a patient’s own immune system to attack cancer cells. The company’s first investigational immuno­therapy is PVX-410, a cancer vac­cine based on re­search in the laboratory of Dr. Kenneth Anderson and Dr. Nikhil Munshi at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

“OncoPep’s decision to support The Myeloma Beacon is …

When I was first diagnosed with myeloma in 2005, I was a 30-year-old new mom, and I felt very alone.

It wasn’t that I didn’t have friends around me. I did – and they were all supportive and helpful. Most of them were also 30-year-old new moms, so I never felt alone motherhood-wise.

Cancer-wise, however, nobody else I knew was going through what I was going through. All of my friends were busy having more babies and look­ing toward the …

A recently published Greek study provides updated data on the sig­nif­i­cance of MRI-detected focal lesions in the spine in patients with smol­der­ing myeloma.

The Greek study confirms that having more than one focal lesion in the spine puts a smoldering myeloma patient at a noticeably higher risk of progressing to multiple myeloma.

Focal lesions are areas of abnormal cells in the bone marrow. They are not lesions in the outer (hard) area of the bone – lesions which are often …

The passing of Arnie Goodman and Stephen Kramer, two men who I only knew from their writings at The Beacon, impacted me in a way that I never would have thought possible.

I struggled to explain to my 18-year old son why I felt such a loss as a re­sult of two men I didn't know personally. It wasn't until I began writing this column that I realized why.

Both men had a purpose-driven life with multiple myeloma. …

A couple of months ago, my girlfriend Audrey and I received email invi­ta­tions to my grandson Blake’s first birthday party. It was scheduled for June 28.

When Audrey and I discussed the invite later that day, she asked:  “You know what that day is?” I thought about it but I drew a blank. She said: “You know … that is THE DAY!”

Then it hit me.

It was June 28, one year prior, that I received the call from my …