Hi Tony,
I was diagnosed in 2008 when I was in my mid-40s and I am still very well and able to work, exercise, go to the theatre – I have seen my children grow up and unless something very unexpected happens, will see one of them married later this year. I have had two stem cell transplants and each one of them gave me five years of remission. My friend, whom I met in daycare on my very first day of treatment, is also still alive, well and not even on any medication at the moment, after 15 years on Revlimid and she has travelled the world and is now working in a demanding part-time job. A colleague of mine also lived out the whole of the last 20 years of his natural life with myeloma and died of something unrelated. Here’s another thing – again on my first day of treatment, I met a vet (!) in the queue for x-rays. He was surprised that such a young person would have myeloma but he said to me – if you have to have myeloma, now is the right time to have it. Such a lot of new treatments are being discovered right now. With new treatments, living with myeloma can be just like living with diabetes.
With the statistics, bear in mind that the people on whom these numbers are based will have been having old-fashioned treatment regimes. We will have to wait a while until we can read statistics based on the treatments people are being given today. Also, the stats will cover the full range of patients, some of whom may have had other co-existing illnesses etc.
