The dog that saved his life

This is just a brief history of Dad's myeloma.

It all started with the dog. Mom was in El Paso visiting Robert and her family. Dad was playing with Rocky, lying on his stomach tossing the ball to him. He reached for the ball, and the rest as they say is history. That simple action caused him to pull a muscle on his right chest tracking along his ribs. Tylenol and heat would help temporarily, but it still bothered him so much that it interrupted his sleep. Mom was worried this could be related to his heart and so he went to see his doctor. They did a chest xray, saw "something concerning," and so the long series of poking and prodding began.

As it turns out, there were no broken bones, but what is called "lytic" lesions on the bones. They are called lytic lesions because they are weakened areas on the bones much like what you see with osteoporosis. Since dad isn't an 85 year old woman, his bones should look healthy. These lesions were the "something concerning" that caused all these further tests. A nuclear med bone scan and lots of blood work later helped his doctor come up with the likely diagnosis of multiple myeloma. On this blog are links related to multiple myeloma that can give you more information. They are great sites and I recommend looking them over if you haven't already.

So why the lytic lesions? Well, these cancer cells, the specific type of cancer that dad has float in his bone marrow. Your bone marrow is where all of your blood cells are formed, the ones that fight infection- or white blood cells, the ones that carry your oxygen, or red blood cells and the ones that help you from bleeding to death, or platelets. The cancer cells in Dad's bone marrow tend to grow much faster than any of the normal cells, bone marrow bullies so to speak. These bullies can cause him to be anemic, make him prone to infection and have problems with bleeding. These cells also activate the cells in your body that break down bones, called osteoclasts. These osteoclasts are in everyone and under normal circumstances don't cause any problems. With dad's cancer cells they are supercharged and break down bones they shouldn't much quicker than normal. This is what caused these lytic lesions, or weakened areas on the bones that showed up on the xray.

In comes Dr. Kahzdan. She is his oncologist, or cancer doctor that will be coordinating all of his treatment. All of the lab work and the bone marrow aspiration and biopsy confirmed the diagnosis of multiple myeloma. We also met with Dr. Lyons, the top oncologist in the city that specializes in multiple myeloma. He agrees and is working with Dr. Kahzdan in formulating dad's treatment regimen.

There is no cure for multiple myeloma, but there are a lot of treatment options available. With the newer drugs and a bone marrow transplant there is now an increasing number of people that are living 10 years in remission and still doing well and living fairly normal lives. Is this the cure? Maybe, hard to say what will happen in the future. We want to believe that it is the closest thing to a cure this disease has yet seen.

Most of the time people with multiple myeloma don't know they have it because there are not any obvious symptoms. Fatigue and back pain are common, but who isn't fatigued and has some back pain on occasion? Most of the time people aren't diagnosed until they are in Stage 3, meaning the disease has progress so far that they have broken bones or they are in kidney failure. Thankfully, Dad is in Stage 2, which means he has more lytic lesions to be considered Stage 1, but his kidneys and everything else are still working great. This means we can treat it early and get him into remission before it can damage his kidneys. So when you talk with him, he will tell you about the dog that saved his life.