Riding The Wave – Multiple Myeloma

One of my CB entries early on…

CB #10

Monday, June 23, 2008

Whew Folks! What a week. From Monday morning when Dave couldn’t get out of bed and missed his trip to Las Vegas, to Monday evening being told after a chest cat scan that he had metastatic cancer of the spine, to finding out en-route through Las Vegas on my way to Marysville that he had Myeloma, to finding out on Friday morning the “Great News” from his Oncologist, that he would make a FULL RECOVERY. It was at that point that I felt run over by a Mack Truck. Just such intense emotion. Telling his parents who were devasted, his brother, our children, our friends, getting some of our medical people in Maryland involved, etc. Dave is doing really great now. Has a great attitude is responding unbelievably well to the two radiation treatments he has had. He was cranky this weekend because he wasn’t getting anymore treatments (M-F is all they do). So I was teasing him that now that he knows he’s going to LIVE, he’s being mean to me! 🙂 He had a really great day today, very relaxing, pain under control, two walks around the hospital floor, showered and shaved. Warm Prune Juice for you know what, and yes, he was successful! 🙂 Tomorrow we have lots of questions for Dr. Nguyen, his Oncologist from UC Davis about exactly what treatment he is getting, what is the timeline of all of this, whether he has any restrictions, how to manage the pain when he leaves the hospital, etc. I’ll report more tomorrow. Imagine Dave whizzing down PCH (Pacific Coast Highway) on his new motorcycle in a few months! Love Lori

We didn’t know at the time that Multiple Myeloma was more often than not a terminal disease. We had no clue. Our doc gave us no indication of the history of this disease. Later on as we learned of it, it was like being run over all over again. But we had conflicting data… sorting it all out became part of this story. All of it fell on me. Researching and withholding from Dave all the bad stuff about this disease in terms of life expectancy. I needed time to reconcile what we had been told vs. what I was reading… this just can’t be happening.

Tags: mack truck