Elaine was a fiery red head who loved her family, open water sailing, and Schlotszky’s sand­wiches. She was mother to my best friend and grand­mother to our god­children. She was care­giver to her hus­band, whose can­cer took him sev­er­al years ago, and she was my friend.

She was also a patient.

In one of life’s ironic tragedies, Elaine tran­si­tioned from can­cer care­giver to can­cer warrior when she was diag­nosed with ad­vanced stage mantle cell lym­phoma in 2012. Elaine became a patient at the can­cer center where we live soon after …

The cur­rent coro­na­virus pan­dem­ic has made some­thing apparent to me: assessing my personal risk level for Covid-19 is complicated, and assessing our “collective risk” may be impossible.

It’s been four months since Covid-19 became a house­hold word and we entered a state of temporary lockdown. As we gathered supplies and made arrangements to work from home, I thought, this isn’t so bad! When else have we had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to stay at home and relax to­geth­er?

I had my mother come down to stay with us so that she wouldn’t be lonely and …

Like a cabinet door left open, the outside world is calling me. To be honest, I’m surprised that I haven’t felt it before now. Towards the end of Feb­ru­ary, con­cerns about COVID-19 were being discussed in the media. Shortly there­after, the first case of the dis­ease was found in the U.S. By the first week of March, my hus­band Daniel and I entered a self-imposed quar­an­tine, which was welcome news to Daniel’s myeloma spe­cialist, who was advising her patients to isolate them­selves as much as possible.

Our county issued stay-at-home restrictions on …

Unexpected things can present tough choices that change the way you live. I sus­pect that most myeloma patients would agree. All myeloma patients have entered a doctor’s office as an “un­ini­ti­ated” (reg­u­lar person) and left as a cancer patient. That diag­nosis changes a person’s life forever, and in its wake there are many choices to be made: initial treat­ment regi­men, radi­a­tion, stem cell trans­plant, clin­i­cal trial par­tic­i­pa­tion, and more.

Over the past six weeks, the pandemic known as coronavirus dis­ease 2019, or COVID-19, has entered the world’s vocabulary. The number of reported cases …

Zero point seven. What is 0.7 to you? For most, it’s insignificant, a number be­tween 0 and 1. It’s a mere decimal. It’s not a com­plete whole, and yet it is more than nothing.

To me, it’s much, much more. It took us a long time to get to 0.7 g/dL (7 g/l).

In De­cem­ber, my husband Daniel’s M-spike reached this all-time low and we were en­cour­aged, for the first time in a long time. I started to wonder if we might get down to 0.0 g/dL. I dreamt of how our lives might change if we could …

For many myeloma patients out there, the chal­lenges of weekly treat­ment in­fusions can create an onerous burden for both the patient and their care­giver. What an understatement!

It’s been tough lately. It’s hard to ex­plain to people that you can put up with almost any treat­ment for a short time, but that be­comes sig­nif­i­cantly more chal­leng­ing when you don’t see an end in sight.

With mixed feelings I hear patients “ringing the bell” to signify the end of their treat­ments at our cancer center. While I’m happy for them, we’ve never …

I try to ap­proach life with a Rosie Riveter attitude of “We can do this!” I try to be en­cour­ag­ing, especially given the chal­lenges that go along with cancer treat­ment. However, since my husband Daniel began induction treat­ment last March, it’s been one uphill battle after another.

Recently, I was fighting insurance and I asked myself, “What could possibly hap­pen next?”  And the universe answered with a re­sound­ing: shingles!

Like many patients, Daniel had chicken pox as a child. People who have had chicken pox before are at a greater risk of …