At the end of October, I traveled to Tucson, Arizona to visit my ailing 76-year-old father. The trip had significant lessons for both patients and caregivers. Since I am both, it had a profound impact on me that I am still trying to organize in my mind.

Dad has both terminal cancer and very late-stage multiple sclerosis, a disease he has battled since he was 25 years old. Due to his cancer diag­nosis in August of 2015, he was not expected to live beyond Christmas 2016. Due to his amazing durability and …

My mother, at age 83, dressed up to go to the grocery store. She chose her tops with an eye for a bright color, such as tangerine orange or scarlet red, to contrast with her black trousers. Her everyday jewelry was beautiful south­western tur­quoise and silver. She applied her makeup behind closed doors, to not give any secrets away.

In her 80’s, Mom was tiny, only 4 foot 10 inches (1.47 m), yet she walked tall with her head up high. When my friends commented on how cute she was, she re­plied with …

I received an autologous stem cell trans­plant in July 2016. I chronicled the day-to-day progress of my trans­plant in the Beacon’s forums, so I won’t repeat that account here. Instead, I’ll share some of my general thoughts and feel­ings about the process.

My stem cell transplant was performed outpatient, but because we live over an hour away from the clinic, we relocated to apartments reserved for transplant patients. While I didn’t like being away from home, this arrange­ment was a …

When we multiple myeloma sufferers were first diagnosed, we all heard from our doctor something like this: “You have multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer that is incurable but treatable.”

And so the waiting and fretting began.

No matter what type of frontline treatment we chose, the questions that we had were all the same.

Will it work?

How long will it take to see results?

Can I achieve a partial, or a very good partial, or even a complete remission?

These questions began to be answered by the results of …

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 was busy multi-tasking a couple of days ago. Well, I wasn’t actually busy busy. And maybe multi-tasking is a bit of an overstatement. Anyway, this is what happened:

I was drinking coffee AND watching tele­vision AND surfing the internet. Oh, and I was eating a Christmas sugar cookie that my daughter had just baked. Now if that’s not multi-tasking, I don’t know what is, right?

Let me start over.

At the very moment I was reading the word ‘mean’ in a comment about multiple myeloma statistics, I heard Thurl …

Many people think of “It’s a Wonderful Life” as the most archetypal Christ­mas film. For me, however, the best holiday film is “A Christmas Carol,” and not just any version, but the 1951 one starring Alastair Sim.

Sim was in many famous British films from this period, and was quite an actor. His interaction as Scrooge with a boy outside, below his window, on Christmas morning is something that I could watch year after year. In fact, I do. To the inconvenience of my family, I have developed a tradition of …