Karl's Multiple Myeloma Journey

First visit with the transplant team! Well the best news is that after 187 days on chemo Dr. Jones told Karl to stop taking it as of today. And he gets at least 2 weeks chemo free. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Karl's appointment was for 1pm, so we left Eastport at 9am. For those of you not familiar with the geography of the island of Newfoundland, it takes 3 hours to drive from Eastport to the capital city of St. John's, and we only have two seasons, winter and construction, so you have to give yourself extra time. Our understanding was that we had an appointment, so we assumed that we'd be out of the hospital by 2ish. We were wrong. We were led into an exam room right on time at 1, so at that point all looked    great from our point of view. Then we waited. And waited some more. It was the theme of the afternoon. Nurse practitioner Charlene came in at 1:25. Her first information was that we would be meeting with several people, so the appointment would be a w

Rounds 5 through 7 So the myeloma markers weren't dropping and Dr. Manning told us that while he initially placed Karl at stage 1, now he was downgrading him to stage 2. It was a disappointing and disheartening appointment. We really didn't know what was going to happen. Then along came Pam with news. Pam is the pharmacist who works at the Ambulatory Clinic at the Health Sciences Centre, which is where Karl gets his chemo. We initially met her prior to the first CyBorD round. At that time she explained  the 28 day process for each chemo round, discribed the side effects of each drug and how we could manage them, and also completed all the paperwork to ask Karl's medical plan to cover the drugs which aren't normally covered, such as his daily shots of Lovenox, which would be costing a small fortune if Pam hadn't worked her magic to convince the drug company to provide it. Now she talked to us about thalidomide. I'd heard about thalidomide years ago from

Chemo First off, Karl noticed that I have been spelling Myeloma incorrectly. I'm not sure if I can change the name of the blog post without starting from scratch. If any reader knows how, please let me know! Back to the story. Dr. Manning told Karl that all test results supported Dr. Vasanthan's diagnosis of Multiple Myeloma. MM can be either stage 1, 2, or 3. The patient's stage depends upon the level of progression of the cancer. If you want more info, check out Mutliple Myeloma Canada because they know far more than        me. He wasn't able to tell us Karl's stage at that point because they were still waiting on the results of the bone marrow biopsy and some of the blood work. Some blood also went to the Mayo clinic for DNA testing. However, he knew Karl wasn't stage 3 because he didn't have elevated calcium in his blood or kidney damage. Karl was slated to start round one of chemotherapy on Friday of that same week. He was also prescribed Loveno

This is my first ever blog post, so bear with me as I learn as I go along! Feel free to offer suggestions or advice! The Diagnosis As many of you know, my husband Karl was diagnosed with a blood cancer, Multiple Myeloma, in early March of 2017. It has been a learning process for both of us since neither of us had heard of Multiple Myloma prior to being told he was having tests to investigate the possibility of that diagnosis. We turned to Google, which was both good and bad since we found great information on some sites such as Multiple Myeloma Canada, but also outdated and even erroneous data on other sites. Beware of Dr. Google and remember that just because you find information on the Internet, it isn't always correct! Karl's journey started while we were vacationing in Florida for the winter. We were both retired and living the dream of a winter without that yucky white stuff. Around Valentine's Day we both had a cold. We went out for a dinner and dance in the c