Hello Dee,
I read your post the other day and was hoping someone wiser than me would have answered it… but maybe no one has because it is such a difficult question to answer.
Myeloma, as I understand it, seems to be an extremely variable kind of cancer that affects people at different speeds and in different ways. Some people live with it for a fairly long time and some people don’t.Some people get a lot of bone damage and some people don’t. Some people get problems with their kidneys and some people don’t etc etc
That must be really difficult and upsetting for you that your children’s father is refusing treatment and there could be many reasons for that. As someone who has had a lot of treatment but is now in second remission, I am utterly grateful for the therapies that exist to help keep this disease at bay and would say that in my experience, the benefits of treatment (for me and for my family) have well outweighed the side-effects/disadvantages and are not always as scary as perhaps the media suggests due to wonderful NHS staff who really helped me to keep my morale up and the huge reduction in pain following treatment courses.
But in my experience, trying to get men to change their mind about anything to do with doctors or hospitals or basically anything to do with their health in general can be like trying to persuade a brick wall to move. So all I can suggest is maybe to arm yourself with as many positive stories as you can (e.g. from this Forurm) so that if he ever opens up a new discussion, you are equipped to hopefully encourage him to seek treatment.
For me (and everyone is different, as I’ve already said) without treatment I would have been expected to live for less than 3 years but with treatment I’ve had over eight already and following my recent Stem Cell Transplant I feel great and all the pain has gone!
You don’t give an indication of the age of your children but there is a book called ‘Kelsey and the Yellow Kite’ which tells the story of a girl whose dad gets Myeloma and I think you can download it from this Myeloma Website and other more general books on Amazon and in bookshops e.g. ‘When Someone You Love has Cancer’ by Alaric Lewis and illustrated by RW Alley.
All the best with this challenging situation,
Rachel
