Hello all!

A Happy Halloween to you.

I have been BURIED at my new job at Activision, the world's largest video game company.  It has been great so far -- I'm extremely busy and it can be stressful but I feel the stress in my head, as in a desire to perform, rather than in my gut, which is where it resided for the last few years at my previous employer.  It got to the point where I found the situation had sufficiently deteriorated that I feared it was creating an environment that could give my disease an excuse to return.  I'm in a much better place right now.

I have been interacting elsewhere with Myeloma patients and there is enough misinformation out there where I'd like to have some upcoming posts on the role of transplants, where Total Therapy stands today (hint: newly diagnosed patients should look into it) and the importance of advanced imaging.

I also want to finish what I started a couple of posts ago.  The upshot of it is: I wish I'd have had the full blown Total Therapy instead of the "lite arm" of it -- although my own personal biology is doing well.  I'll have to see what the most recent studies show when I return to Arkansas in January for more follow-up.  BB alluded to the fact that an update of the curves posted below exists, and hopefully those curves do show a plateau.

For the moment, it proves that alkylators work on newly diagnosed standard risk patients -- and it proves that they work better than novel agents without them.  After all, the only difference between Total Therapy 4 standard and lite is that the lite arm got less of the alkylators.  They use the same amount of novel drugs.  And look at the difference in progression-free survival?

It's getting harder and harder to argue that, for newly diagnosed patients younger than 70 years old and with standard risk characteristics, Total Therapy isn't the best therapeutic route.

I shall pick this thread up when time permits.  For the moment, I wanted you to know that I'm still doing well -- and I certainly hope the same for you and yours!