Our Moral Walls

Wed. Jan. 18, 2023 -8:50 AM Sky is blue this morning and it’s calm with no wind, but last night I swore the sky was falling. Sure felt that way. We sleep on the south-east side of the house, that’s the direction of the prevailing wind.  If there’s going to be a tree fall on the house during a storm, it will be from that direction, from the south-east. We seldom get strong winds at our home in…

Keep Busy, Don’t You Know!

In my last post I mentioned that I’ve put together one hundred and fifty thousand words on my blog since I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in the fall of 2019.  Looking back on my many posts, I’m now concluding that I’ve said pretty much all I want to say about my relationship with myeloma. There may be a few more details I can profitably address such as increasing levels of pain, and Its…

It’s my Birthday.

Yeah, it’s my birthday. No big deal. I’m starting on my 77th year. That seems like a long time, but time is relative. I just finished a book by Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. Time in the context of dinosaurs is measured in millions of years. Even then, two million years is a relatively short period of time. Now, I’m reading another Brusatte book, The Rise and Reign of the…

Funny, but I don’t feel like a dying man, nor am I eager to find out what that’s like. No matter what the medical experts think, I don’t feel as though I’m dying.  All the indicators are there: I’m dying. I’m old and I have myeloma. Myeloma is incurable and I’ve probably had it for at least a decade, but I was only diagnosed with it in the fall of 2019. At that point I already had lytic lesions…

How Long Does He Have?

I don’t know, but I wonder if anyone has asked any of my family or friends that question about me. It’s a common question in movies or on television ‘medical’ dramas. Of course, it’s virtually impossible to answer that question unless the circumstances have been set up ahead of time to determine the time of anyone’s death. In most circumstances we just don’t know. In some we do. Maybe you have a…

Bits and pieces of this and that.

November 15th, 2022 Starring blankly out over the front yard a couple of days ago at our driveway that stretches about sixty metres (two hundred feet) to the road an image suddenly came to me of a road covered in red, yellow, and orange leaves much like our driveway is this morning. Unlike our driveway, however, it was clearly a one-way road and a dead-end to boot. I daydreamed about walking…

Well, it’s November 7th, 2022. I’m not sure I’ll ever recover from the times I’ve spent in hospital over the past few months stewing in ERs with high fevers and infections all over the place. At least I’m home now and I can sleep as much as I need to without being plugged into an infusion pump. No more infusions for me! Of course no more infusions means no more chemo means not even any remote…

Myeloma, Sex, and Dementia

October 30, 2022 I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m not my usual chipper self today. I was in the Hospital again for a few days starting on Tuesday morning the 25th. On Monday afternoon I got radiation treatment on my back and right femur. That evening and especially during the night, I developed a high fever and once again I ended up on the floor in our hotel room unable to get back into bed.…

Some (Moderately) Good News for a Change

Yesterday late afternoon we had a short meeting with Dr. Nicol Macpherson, an oncologist at the BC Cancer Agency. As I expected it was a watershed moment in my myeloma journey. Macpherson started by asking us to get him up to date. So, I laid out the disastrous weekend I experienced after my last Carfilzomib infusion on September 15th and suggested I was done with chemotherapy because it was all…

MAID and Aggressive Myeloma

So, things are moving along. To recap: I went into the hospital for my infusion of the chemo med Carfilzomib on September 15th. On the 15/16th during the night I didn’t sleep at all because I was in an altered state and shivering uncontrollably. In the morning, we called the Cancer Care Centre at the hospital, and they told Carolyn to take me to Emerg right away. It was a good thing she did…

One Day at a Time.

Who knows how much time I may have left to live. A week, a month, a year, two years, it’s all the same to me because after I’m dead, I won’t be around to regret or celebrate anything that happened to me while I was alive, including dying. I had my last chemo treatment on September 15th. That’s it as far as chemo goes for me. On the 16th I had to go to the ER to reverse the damage to my body…

Not Dead (Just) Yet.

From the many comments I received after my last post A Time To Die I obviously left the impression that I was on my way to an imminent death. I guess the concept of ‘imminent’ is what the issue is. Without intervention I have no idea when I will die although I can set up a situation through Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) whereby I can determine the time and place of my death. I’ve filled out…

A Time to Die?

Well, howdy there internet people, it’s me again. Visited my local GP/oncologist this morning. He showed us images of the growth that is happening alongside the left side of my spine. I think it’s trying to replace the kidney that I lost in 2002. It’s big enough. Just kidding, of course. The growth is pretty impressive, let me tell you. I’m not feeling any ill effects from it at the moment…

Myeloma: a Killer by Degree

[I wrote this post in May 2022, not that long ago. I reread it and I think it bears reposting. I keep getting bad news on the myeloma front. I had an MRI last Sunday and it showed a growth, a tumour if you like, growing on my lumbar spine and extending upwards to the left side of my thoracic area half way up my back. It’s a fairly new thing, and is ten centimetres long, five wide, and seven…

Memory Works With A Little Effort

I’m not sure if you’ll be able to access this Atlantic article or not, so I’ll just summarize it a bit for you. It’s about memory or remembering and whether you remember events in the past from the first or third person perspective. I would expand the argument to include imagined events in the future. When you remember a past event, say one that was particularly notable, do you remember it as…

Carfilzomib and Buttle Lake

Wednesday, August 17th, 2022 – 2:30 PM Just got back from the hospital for the first infusion of carfilzomib for the second cycle of this protocol. It went well, but as usual, I’m dexed out. Given this was my second cycle I didn’t have to stay after my infusion for an hour of observation. I had to go to the lab yesterday for bloodwork and the results were available today for us via MyHealth.…

July 27th, 2022. It has been about twenty hours since my second infusion of carfilzomib. I take dexamethasone in conjunction with my infusion and that’s what I’m feeling the effects of predominantly at the moment. I’m dexed out, and I will be for a while yet. What concerns me the most is a repetition of the fever I got last Thursday as a side effect of carfilzomib. That fever at 38.9˚C sent me…