Cancer.
It’s as scary as a word gets. For millions of Americans it’s one of those things that happens to other people. There is maybe a friend or a family member, maybe a friend of friend with cancer, or maybe just someone you heard about that one time at your company or on Facebook.
Until 2019, I was one of them.
Multiple Myeloma
Not a lot of people have heard of multiple myeloma. That’s not surprising. It is considered a “rare” cancer. In 2018, approximately 125,000 people were living with myeloma in the United States. That might sound like a lot, but consider that there are 327 million people living in the U.S. and that percentage looks pretty small.
Or, if you want to compare multiple myeloma to more common cancers, consider that 268,000 new cases of breast cancers will be diagnosed this year alone. That’s more than the total ongoing cases of myeloma. Multiple myeloma’s closest, more famous, cousin is Leukemia, with 200,00 new cases diagnosed in the United States each year.
Getting Rare Cancer
Not only is multiple myeloma a rare cancer, it is most frequently diagnosed in people aged 65-74 years old. So, imagine how “lucky” you have to get to be diagnosed with multiple myeloma at age 45.
Yeah. I’d have rather gone to Vegas, thanks.
Why Another Website
So, what is the point of this whole thing?
Well, I’m a writer. I always have been. It’s my way of talking and actually getting to say what I mean to say. Also, I build websites. What’s one more?
Most importantly, writing can be therapeutic. I find that such writing is more therapeutic when I put it “out there.” Whether anyone ever finds it and reads it, or not is irrelevant. The fact that I publish what I think, write, and feel, is similar to actually talking to someone for me.
Finally, when I was first diagnosed with multiple myeloma I went searching for resources and had trouble coming up with what I was looking for. While there are many great resources out there with facts and figures for multiple myeloma, those resources are often very clinical. The American Cancer Society has a multiple myeloma section that is full of solid, factual information. The International Multiple Myeloma Foundation is another good resource.
And, if you see one of these in the literature holders at your oncologist’s office, or at the hospital, I highly recommend picking one up. It’s called the Multiple Myeloma guidelines for patients.
It’s nice to be able to thumb through a book when you’re brain is filled with a fog of worry and fear. (The same thing is available online at NCCN.org/patients.) You’ll have to click on that “more cancers” button in order to find the multiple myeloma one though. Might as well start getting used to it, this is an”other” cancer.
However, when you write advice like that for a broad audience you have to careful to not be too specific lest you write something that does not apply to everyone. One of the most frustrating things about multiple myeloma is constantly being told that everyone is different, so no one will really give you any answers.
It is true of course. Everyone is different. Not only that, there are a ton of different kinds of multiple myeloma characterized by which genes are mutated and what kind of light chains you have, and so on. And, that’s all before you account for the fact that it will affect younger people differently than older people. That some people tolerate treatment very well, while others don’t tolerate it at all. Still others respond well to some things while others don’t.
The purpose of this website then will be to provide MY experience and MY discoveries that I make about MY multiple myeloma along the way. Such specific, real world, understand of what it is like to actually have multiple myeloma is incredibly useful, even if not everything applies to your specific case. As such, I hope to provide a myeloma resource that I wish I would have found back when I was first diagnosed, and frankly, ever since.
It will take a while. I’ve been “meaning” to start writing this site for almost six months now, but one of the things that MM does is rob you of time. Between doctor appointments, fatigue, medication side effects, and mental stress getting to things like extra projects can be tough. The good news is that I’ve got ideas, and now I’ve got it started. That means it will come easier and faster now.