I was recently grousing about the individualized nature of multiple mye­lo­ma. In this modern day, we have some cancers that are curable, and many that are so predictable in their course that treatment is standardized.

Multiple myeloma is not either of those types of cancers. What works for you will not work for me and vice versa. Some of you started with MGUS or smoldering myeloma. Some of you may never advance beyond that. Others, and I am in this category, started right out of the gate with full-blown multiple myeloma. …

Santa left some small, cheap jigsaw puzzles in our stockings. They are flimsy and garishly colored. Last week, we cleared off a coffee table, cut one box open, and spread out the pieces.

Jigsaw puzzles can be huge time sinks, as much as any electronic en­ter­tain­ment. This particular puzzle is of a carousel horse, its colors tinted towards the Fauvism spectrum. It has 660 pieces, over 600 of which look identical to the casual eye. No wonder an hour can go by while I try to find the next piece of the …

I have been on Pomalyst (pomalidomide), plus Kyprolis (carfilzomib) and dexa­meth­a­sone (Decadron), since this past July. It has been an inter­est­ing journey, to say the least.

Like Revlimid (lenalidomide) before it, Pomalyst showered me with lots of side effects, ranging from a bright red rash the first cycle, to peeling face and scalp, to extreme cold chills in the middle of the night, to hands shaking so violently that I could not take a picture and get a crisp image. While some of the side effects pulled back with later rounds, …

I have been silent for a couple of months, dealing with sea changes to my treat­ment regimen. These changes have thrown some major stumbling blocks into my life, and I am not yet ready to write about that increas­ingly touchy topic.

Fortunately, an intriguing and intense conversation with my good friend and sister-in-law Margaret provided me with a conundrum to puzzle over and this month’s column topic to boot.

I don’t have any answers, but readers might.

Margaret and I were walking and talking, as we love to do, when she asked …

“You’ll be an N of 1,” said Tim, my oncologist.

I winced inside. My oncologist had no way of knowing it, but he had inadvertently evoked a Beacon column written by Arnie Goodman, who died in 2014.

Arnie Goodman was a favorite of mine because he didn’t mince words about his condition, which grew increasingly dire. In his column, “N of 1,” Arnie explained that he and his oncologist were trying a new drug, Empliciti (elotuzumab), in combination with Revlimid and dexamethasone to see if …

Call me Tik-Tok.

Tik-Tok was the mechanical man created by L. Frank Baum and intro­duced in Ozma of Oz. While he appears in other Oz books, it is in his debut that the reader gains an appreciation for Tik-Tok’s mechanical works, including his apparently tireless activities.

There was one catch with Tik-Tok. As a mechanical man, he had to be wound: under his left arm for thinking, under his right arm for speech, and in the center of his back for “walking and action.”

And if he wasn’t wound? Tik-Tok would come …

The infusion regimen I follow for Kyprolis (carfilzomib) is two con­secu­tive days a week, three con­secu­tive weeks in a round, rest one week, repeat. Each session lasts two hours, more or less, so in any com­plete round of treatment I spend 12 or more hours of en­forced down­time, sitting in a chair while chemicals drip into my body.

What to do, what to do?

I don’t carry a tablet. I don’t have a smart phone, just a way retro flip phone from which I text only. I don’t knit, crochet, …