“Daddy, do you remember that Christmas when you were bald?” my eight-year old daughter Lizzie recently asked me.

Until that point we had been talking about the eagles that occasionally glided in the skies above the lake next to our home in the Ozarks of southwestern Missouri.

“Uh… yes,” I chuckled, amused at her segue from bald eagles to the cue-ball that I had donned three years earlier during my chemotherapy treatments for myeloma. “Do you remember when I was…

A team of British and German researchers have identified specific areas of the human genome that consistently differ between people with multiple myeloma and people who do not have the disease.

The new findings, summarized in a research article published yesterday, help explain why the risk of developing myeloma seems to be higher in some families than in others.

Moreover, by clearly identifying regions of the human genome linked to an increased risk of myeloma, the European research could lead…

Since I got my myeloma diagnosis five and a half years ago, I haven’t been given to bouts of depression.

With a myeloma diagnosis, you really don’t have time to feel sorry for yourself.

I’ve tried to take in stride all the things “they” have done to me – two autologus stem cell transplants, a myriad of chemotherapy side effects, an open lung biopsy, and endless needle sticks, just to name a few.

Then there’s the prodding, probing, and testing…

During the course of their disease, multiple myeloma patients some­times develop what physicians call either “extram­edullary disease,” “extra­medullary plasmacytomas,” or “extra­medullary myeloma.”

In medicine, when something is described as “extramedullary,” it means it is located outside of the bone marrow.

So “extramedullary” myeloma is myeloma that is outside of the bone marrow.

It occurs when malignant plasma cells collect together and form tumors in parts of the body other than a patient’s bones.

This can occur in any myeloma patient,…

Nonsecretory myeloma is a topic shrouded in apprehension and mystery.

Patients with nonsecretory myeloma have a host of questions.  How do I track the progress of my disease? Should nonsecretory myeloma be treated differently than “standard” myeloma?  Is my prognosis different because I am nonsecretory?

Among myeloma patients with secretory disease, nonsecretory myeloma is something they often have heard of, but they are not always sure what it is, or whether it is really relevant to them.

Given the many…