Happy New Year to all! I am so hoping that all of us have a good year.

I am a bit compulsive about making lists, and I work from lists on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. This is the time of year, however, when I put together a very special list: my New Year’s resolutions!

The focus of my New Year’s resolutions has been shifting over the years, especially since my multiple myeloma diagnosis more than six years ago (this January actually marks the sixth anniversary of my autologous stem cell …

It is that time of year for seasonal greetings, parties, and gifts.

In my family, we have a tradition of putting stockings on the hearth, filled with interesting, small gifts that are known as stocking stuffers. This tradition dates back to my childhood days, but we continue with it even now, decades later.

I tried to think of what could be useful and appropriate as a stocking stuffer for a myeloma patient and caregiver, and came up with the following ideas.

Books make ideal stocking stuffers because they come in handy when …

Sometimes I wish I could just forget about myeloma and put it in the past as a difficult chapter in my life.

I was pretty close to forgetting about it during the three and a half years when I was in remission and did not need any treatment.

That period ended a year ago when I relapsed and started treatment again with a daily dose of 25 mg of Revlimid (lenalidomide) and a weekly dose of 20 mg of dexamethasone (Decadron).

Even though I think that I am on …

The sunrises here in the foothills are spectacular in the fall. Beautiful oranges, pinks, and lavenders light the clouds from below. In addition, the leaves are in full splendor, shining in gold, orange, and red. There isn’t a nicer time of year to get outdoors. It inspires me to lace up my trainers, put on a fitness tracker, plug in some ear buds, and head out for a walk.

A daily walk seems quite normal to me because when I was growing up, we walked to school and back. Although the distance …

Sometimes in the summer here in the foothills of the Rockies, we have severe thunderstorms and hail. One such storm last month included funnel clouds, a precursor to tornadoes. Although hail came pelting down, no harm to people was reported that afternoon because our whole city was alerted by a tornado watch. My husband Dilip and I were glad not to be out driving around, since some underpasses were flooded and cars were stranded.

There was a silver lining to those ominous storm clouds, as we found out later. They had been …

At the end of last month, my husband Dilip and I went on a nine-day road trip from Calgary through the Canadian Rockies to Whistler, British Columbia, on to Vancouver Island, and back to Calgary via Vancouver. It was more than 30 hours of driv­ing al­to­gether, al­though we never drove more than seven hours in one stretch. In our love­ly sum­mer weather, this is doable, which prob­a­bly ex­plains why the traffic was heavy.

Dilip did all the driving, although I offered to help. Maybe I am fine as a ‘co-pilot’, reading the …

As another summer in the Foothills enfolds, with warm weather, brilliant flowers, sunshine and showers, and the relaxed atmosphere of outdoor living, I can only remember dimly how different the summer of 2009 was for me. I spent most of the summer of 2009 indoors. I was suffering from back pain and feeling very sick after being diagnosed with Stage 3 myeloma in July of that year.

I was very worried about my future. Receiving a cancer diagnosis is not anything anyone would like to have to deal with. And to …