Four years of ongoing chemotherapy may have made my memory a bit fuzzy at this point, but I don’t exactly recall having scribbled the following onto my bucket-list:

"Get multiple myeloma, say goodbye to life as you know it."

I certainly have no desire to prove my mettle by taking on such a menacing foe. I really do have better things I’d rather do with my life.

I’d much more prefer to run the bases at Yankee Stadium, or hike the Appalachian Trail, or catch a trophy-sized blue marlin off the coastal …

A well-known psychologist and philosopher, James Hillman, wrote:

“The great task of a life-sustaining culture is to keep the invisibles attached… And then we must look back over our lives at some of the accidents and curiosities and oddities and troubles and sicknesses and begin to see more in those things than we saw before…There is still a thread of individual character that determines how you live through those things. This is destiny. Symptoms are part of our calling — they force us to go deeper.”

The term “invisibles” intrigues me. I …

One of the first questions most of us probably ask after being diagnosed with multiple myeloma is "How long do I have?", or some derivative thereof.  For me, I think the question came right after asking what multiple myeloma is, and whether it's curable.

Perhaps it might be better to take a more philosophical approach and respond by asking "How long does anyone have?", reflecting the fact that life is a crap shoot, stuff happens, and we truly don't know when we will die.

After all, barring any knowledge of the unforeseen, …

After my sister Deana, who has multiple myeloma, struggled with an infection for much of June, we are all grateful that July was a much quieter month.

I should say that Deana felt my coverage of her cold and emergency room visit in last month’s column was an overly dramatic retelling.  I stand by my version of events, even if I wasn’t in Pittsburgh with Deana to witness all of it firsthand.  Perception is reality, and I perceived it as a bad situation.

On Saturday, July 14, Deana and her nine-year …

My great great grandparents emigrated to Nova Scotia from Scotland in the 1840’s. 

Of course their lives were much more difficult compared to how we live today, but the thing that stands out in my great great grandmother’s own account of her life is how many children she had and how many died during childhood. 

Of her 14 children, seven did not survive to adulthood. All of them died of infec­tious diseases. This cast a pall on her remaining life. My great grand­mother, who was the seventh child, wrote that her mother forever mourned …

Just as I had settled down to get some inspiration for this month’s column, my young daughter breezed into my office to share this juicy information about her older sister:

“Daddy, Katie said the F-word!”

I was shocked to even hear Lizzie say ‘F-word.’ Taken by surprise, I sprayed a mouthful of my morning coffee and blurted out, “She did not!”

Before I could stop her, young Lizzie, with a twinkle in her eye, trumpeted, “Katie called a lady fat!”

Oh, that F-word, I thought as I breathed a sigh of relief. …

Monday was a big day for me.

After undergoing 36 consecutive weeks of Revlimid, Velcade, and dexamethasone therapy since my stem cell transplant, I was hoping that Monday would be the day I could officially begin my easier-to-tolerate maintenance regimen.

Combination therapy with Revlimid (lenalidomide), Velcade (bortezomib), and dexamethasone (Decadron), known as RVD, had been tough for me to take over the last few months.  My platelet and white blood cell counts had been low and continued to edge down.  I was sore and out-of-sorts.  My body was screaming …