2. Doctors

The entry ballot

Not everyone gets in after applying for the bigger marathons, it’s a matter of luck.

I eventually followed Sue’s advice and tried the doctors.  They might not massage a pulled muscle but this was a bit of a mystery now so it couldn’t do any harm.  I had a Livi video call with a GP as my 64th birthday treat which led to blood tests and an x-ray.  After some extra blood tests, I received a call from the surgery receptionist who said that the GP wanted to arrange a call to go through the results.

Tuesday 24th January was already going to be a stressful day.  We had a call arranged with our financial advisor to work out how to fund our spending for the next year with the backdrop of an underperforming pension fund and rampant inflation.  I decided to squeeze the GP call in 30 minutes beforehand.

May I say a big thank you to Dr Simpson.  I don’t think we have talked other than in that phone call but thanks for paying attention to my results and spotting the signs.  I wrote down some brief notes at the time.

Then it was straight onto pension crystallisation events and tax-free cash.

Around lunchtime Sue and I took a moment to consider what this GP call meant.  We had, of course, never heard of multiple myeloma.  It all seemed rather unreal.  Me?  I’ve never been ill.  

In the afternoon I was in touch with Vitality Health to see if my policy would be of use.  They assured me it would and told me to pick a consultant haematologist from their list of three.  How to choose? Each had a brief CV and one seemed to be filled in a bit more than the other two.  I might easily have picked one of the others.  I chose and clicked enter on the website and suddenly the phone was ringing and I made an appointment for two days’ time.

I didn’t sleep much for the next two nights.  A quick Google of myeloma assured me that that was not the way to get the facts.  Was I going to last until Thursday?  What would the future hold?

Time for a little help from our friends.  A close friend had cancer some years ago so we gave him a call.  It was the best thing we could have done.  He had the same consultant and recommended him as the best in the region.  Also, he had heard of multiple myeloma and knew someone who had lived with it for more than 20 years.  That did so much to calm my nerves, even if it might be a false sense of security.

We met the consultant late on the Thursday night and he gave us a whistle stop tour of stem cells, immunoglobulin, light chains, and paraproteins.  Best of all he gave us more confidence, as well as some links to reliable information sources at Myeloma UK and Macmillan.

It turns out I’m not the only one, five to six thousand people are diagnosed with multiple myeloma each year and 24,000 people live with it.  And my consultant and his team are far from new to it all.  In the first few days, this information more than anything else is very reassuring.