Despite being a lifelong Boston Celtics fan, one of my favorite coaches is former Los Angeles Lakers coach Pat Riley.

I know that sounds traitorous to most Celtics fans, es­pe­cial­ly con­sider­ing the fierceness of the teams’ rivalry in the early and mid 1980s:  Bird versus Magic, Showtime versus Blue Collar, Kareem versus The Chief, McHale versus Worthy.

With all due respect to Lebron James, Kevin Durant, and the rest of the NBA today, those were the glory days of the …

Remember Love Canal?

If you came of age in the 1970s or earlier in the United States, you surely re­mem­ber Love Canal.

Love Canal was a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, built atop a chem­i­cal waste dump that had been closed and covered with dirt in the early 1950s. An elementary school was built first, followed soon by the houses.

Even though residents soon started noticing odd smells and oily sub­stances leaching up into the play­ground, it wasn’t …

Since my family have jobs in the health care field, I tend to hear a lot about med­i­cal problems.

I therefore had heard of multiple myeloma before my own diagnosis. Even though I knew of some people who had this disease, I have to admit that I didn’t know much about it, except that it is a blood cancer.

After receiving my diagnosis, the number of people with myeloma I heard about sky­rock­eted, since everybody around me seemed to …

Having recently been discharged from the hospital after my third cycle of high-dose chemo, I was at the outpatient clinic at the hospital recently on a Saturday for lab work and a checkup.

The medical tech who was drawing my blood was a woman I have come to know.  She has seen me walking in, dragging myself in, and being wheeled in through years of treatment.  She has seen me through two stem cell transplants, a donor transplant, multiple rounds …

A recent Spanish study adds important findings to the growing literature about the measurement and significance of minimal residual disease in multiple myeloma.

Myeloma patients are said to have minimal residual disease if, after having responded well to treatment, they nevertheless continue to have myeloma cells in their bodies.

In their study, the Spanish researchers used a sensitive new technique known as deep sequencing to conduct minimal residual disease testing. They used the technique to test for residual disease in …

Before I get started, I want to share good news about my ongoing myeloma therapy.

If you recall, after a recent relapse, my doctors and I had decided to try adding Revlimid (lenalidomide) to my doublet of Velcade (bortezomib) and dexa­meth­a­sone (Decadron) one last time, hoping it might still work.  Although it has only been two months, the combination does seem to be helping; my M-spike has dropped from 0.5 g/dL down to 0.4 …

Findings from a prospective Phase 2 clinical trial indicate that the com­bi­na­tion of Revlimid, Velcade, and dexamethasone is effective in relapsed and refractory multiple myeloma patients.

The trial enrolled 64 patients, who had been treated with a median of two prior therapies, at six different U.S. cancer centers from 2006 to 2008.

Nearly two-thirds of the patients in the trial achieved at least a partial re­sponse, despite the fact that more than half of the patients had previous­ly been treated …