I think I am a believer in “The Force.”  No, let’s say that I do believe in it.

So that raises the question: What the heck is it?

The traditional thinking is that there’s an energy force that you can tap, consciously or perhaps not, that can help you fight the “bad things” that are affecting you personally.  Maybe even to completely resist them.

Some people might refer to this as “force of will,” which I think is also a part of what The Force is all about.  I think, and from …

I recently read an article in the Kansas City Star that looked at how cancer patients are treated by others, and how we are looked upon by our society in general.

Overall, I thought the sense of the article was quite negative, but maybe not far off the mark.

It reminded me, too, that I don’t really want others to think of me first off as a cancer patient.

A couple of years ago, for example, I was speaking with a reporter about a high-profile multiple myeloma patient and giving him …

In last month’s column, I took a look at risks patients face in hospitals, mostly from the perspective of “adverse events” – harmful, even fatal, occurrences that are unrelated to your underlying medical problem.  They occur in almost a third of admissions.

Kent Bradley, one of the commenters on last month’s column, rightly pointed out that on top of the adverse event numbers, you have to consider also medical errors – mistakes that are made in treating you.  So, he posted, “We’re running a much higher risk of harm.”

I passed …

We myeloma patients spend a lot of time in and at hospitals.

Hospitals are places where wonderful things happen – lives are saved, the ill are made well, and worn-out bodies are restored – much due to what the cliché refers to as “miracles of modern medicine.”

There’s another side to hospitals, though, that demands wariness and requires that you pay the greatest attention to what’s going on around you.  Pat Killingsworth wrote about one aspect of this last week in Pat’s Place: Poor Communication Can Cost A Myeloma Patient Time And …

I thought I’d share with you a bit of the story about multiple myeloma and me.

Mostly, I’ve resisted conveying this tale, but I realized lately that when I meet people with myeloma for the first time, we quickly start talking about how we learned we had the disease and how we’ve been treated.

If I’ve learned anything from these talks it is that we are all so different – with treatments that can be widely divergent, and with greatly varied attitudes about how to deal with myeloma.

None of us knew …

Most of us with myeloma have probably experienced those days when some drug side effect has ruined an otherwise perfectly good spring day, or summer afternoon.

In the first year of my post-stem cell transplant days, I managed to find myself in the hospital on Memorial Day, July 4, and Labor Day weekends.  How exciting.  On one of those stays, I clearly recall sitting and reading a book by the room’s open window, listening to revelers late in the night having a grand old time as their sounds carried the distance from …

Back in 1988, Phyllis Susser, one of the founders and the executive director of Herbert G. Birch Community Services (now Birch Family Services), was establishing a home in Brooklyn for abandoned AIDS babies.

Some of us were helping her deal with the overwhelming negativity and ferocious opposition from the neighbors and the surrounding community.

It was at this Brooklyn residence for babies, whose only home to that point had been a hospital, that I met Geraldine Ferraro.

Back in the late 1980s, you have to understand that the fear of and misunderstanding …