Patience is not one of my virtues.

I was reminded of this as I began my Christmas shopping five days earlier than normal. I waited 20 minutes to get a smoothie at our local fast food restaurant. It is because of waits like these and my lack of patience that I normally do my Christ­mas shopping on Christmas Eve day.

There is little traffic, the stores are not crowded, the lines at the gift wrap­ping kiosks are not long, and one doesn’t have to wait for 30 minutes to get a table …

My husband Daniel and I love visiting New York City at Christmas time. No other city seems to decorate quite so well, and we find all the festivity is just what the doctor ordered to get us in the holiday spirit.

We made our familiar pilgrimage to New York earlier this month, and we visited a major department store to see the holiday windows and all the decorations they had hanging inside.

The store’s theme this year is Believe in the Magic of Christmas, and while I understand that it’s a department …

Those of you who have been following my story remember how carefully my wife Pattie and I weighed the pros and cons before deciding I would proceed with a salvage autologous stem cell transplant.

The transplant this summer worked so well that my myeloma specialist strongly recommended that we repeat it this fall.

There was just a touch of measurable multiple myeloma left. Why not stick with a therapy that was working? Hit my myeloma hard while it’s down.

Once again, we agreed with his logic. Just as I began to recover …

I have noticed a difference, one I may have mentioned earlier, but one which is becoming more pronounced in recent months. Given my lab results, my myeloma seems to be slipping back into remission. I am grate­ful for that. But after 11 years of the disease and treatments, my body is wear­ing down. To borrow from Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, the night brigade has been out there busily taking down the perimeter defenses.

As a result, I have an increased awareness of time slipping through my fingers. I am like a child …

Sometimes I know what I am going to write about several weeks before the column is due, and other times it’s a last minute brainstorm.

For this month, the germ of an idea had been rolling around in my brain for a while. Yet, as you will see, it took an unexpected turn at the last minute.

The subject is the importance of goals.

It has been proven through at least one fairly rigorous study that positive thinking has no ultimate impact on a cancer patient’s prognosis. However, such thinking sure …

Since it’s nearly the holidays, I’m sure that the story of Apollo 8 is on everyone’s mind.

Well, perhaps not.

Apollo 8 was the first manned mission to leave Earth orbit and fly to the moon, orbiting it on Christmas Eve 1968. The crew broadcast back live TV views of the lunar surface from close up. If you were a young space fan at the time, it was tremendously exciting and felt like an epochal moment in history.

For the first time, mankind had learned how to leave home …

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 …