Today I completed the last of my 13 radiation treatments for the lesion in my right hip.  Let’s hear it for lucky 13!

As I gathered my things and headed to the changing room, one of the radiation techs wished me well and said goodbye.  She added they would all miss me.

“Don’t worry.”  I said.  “I will probably see you again in a few years.”

“Don’t say that!” she replied, a bit surprised.

“That’s ok.  I know my myeloma will come back,” I explained.  I ended our conversation by saying “When …

I love it when a well-laid plan comes together and I can thumb my nose at that dastardly myeloma, yet again!

My wife, a busy teacher, our two energetic school-aged daughters, and I were excitedly planning our mid-March Spring Break vacation.

At the same time, I had been trying to schedule my next quarterly multiple myeloma check-up, but because of other obligations and a full patient load at the treatment center, the only time available to squeeze me in was, you guessed it, during the girls’ Spring Break. Bummer!

Karen …

Finding out that you have multiple myeloma can make you a little neurotic. What else would you expect from someone who has been diagnosed with an incurable form of cancer?

After all, learning you might die in the relatively near future is enough to drive anyone a little crazy.

But the key here is “relatively near future.”

Although there are exceptions, the younger one is when he or she receives their diagnosis, the more difficult the adjustment seems to be.

It is usually worse in the beginning because, young or old, …

For some time, I have been reading about how close a number of multiple myeloma experts feel they are to turning multiple myeloma into a chronic disease.

This should be good news, right?  Novel therapy agents are delaying disease progression for years in a large majority of patients.  Median life expectancy has also jumped up, and these same experts expect that this number should continue to rise quickly.

But a number of multiple myeloma patients are saying “NOT SO FAST!”

One fellow patient hates when doctors speak proudly about multiple myeloma soon …

“Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one’s bath like a lump of sugar,” said Pablo Picasso. However, the bath does melt aches and pains that multiple myeloma patients often encounter.

According to one study, about 60 per­cent of myeloma patients endure bone disease in the forms of vertebral compression fractures and osteolytic lesions. Myeloma cells push aside normal bone-forming cells, causing weakened bones that fracture easily. Bone involvement is a perma­nent feature of my myeloma, as it is for many others. Living with myeloma …

As you may already know, I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma four years ago, and part of my early therapy was to radiate several large lesions located up and down my spine.

I was initially treated at a state-of-the-art facility outside the Twin Cities in Minnesota. Treatment consisted of a twenty minute session under a huge, rotating robot-like machine, for ten days.

Twice the machine broke down before or during my treatment. Once I was forced to impatiently lie on the table for over two hours waiting for my treatment to resume. They …

I like to communicate with my doctors by email.

Having spent a great deal of my career talking on the phone, the embracing of email in the work world has had a profound change in the way I do business.   Once upon a time, I might spend as much as two-thirds of the day on the phone.  Today, there’s an awful lot of time between phone calls.  Sometimes a whole workday goes by.

Anyway, it’s not always easy – sometimes it’s impossible – to get a doctor to agree to email communication.  …