Congressman Scalise’s diagnosis of Multiple Myeloma (MM) brings attention to the fact that September is Blood Cancer Awareness Month.
I know the Congressman is trying to show a brave face and be optimistic in public, but MM is a terrible disease and the outcomes can range from you live between 3 - 20 more years, depending on the exact genetics of your MM. It’s not as easy as his announcement implies it is. It’s not just get a few months of treatment and bounce back.
Irony is I lost my cousin on September that too because of blood cancer (leukaemia). We tried bone marrow transplant but it didn’t work.
That’s terrible, bone marrow transplant can be really fraught. It’s dangerous and doesn’t always work. Truly, all cancer is bad, but some are worse than others. Blood cancers can be really bad, often you’re never cancer free, then it stops responding to the on-going treatment and it comes roaring back. There’s an expectation in the general public sometimes that, “oh, you’re taking chemo now, so you’ll be cured in a few months, right?” It’s very taxing to repetitively tell people that she will never be cured; or they’ll ask what kind of cancer she has, or what the survival rate is for her type (it’s bad, and Rep. Scalise is in that bad boat), as if you’re idly comparing stamp collections. I had to put my foot down with my family and email them some websites, saying “RTF website and don’t pepper us with painful questions anymore or give us useless advice”. It’s important to have Blood Cancer Awareness Month because they are so tough and a diverse set of diseases.
Yeah, he had gone through numerous chemo, then transplant. People also suggested us to try so many things and doctors.