March 12, 2012 - The Waste of a Life

I haven’t written in a while and I apologize for that, but to be honest, I have struggled with the topic that I’m going to discuss and that is Whitney Houston’s death. I could not make up my mind if I wanted to pursue it, but as we have gotten further from her death, I feel that it will be easier to discuss.

Whitney Houston, like many entertainers, was given a remarkable talent. Beautiful, vibrant and with the voice of an angel, she burst on the music scene like an atomic bomb. She was everywhere. She sold millions of albums, appeared in movies and ended up on the cover of every beauty and entertainment magazine. Yet, twenty years later, she died alone in a hotel still fighting demons that had taken over her life.

How many times have we seen this happen? In my lifetime alone, drugs and alcohol have taken the lives of so many entertainers and musicians that they are almost too numerous to list. Just to name a few: Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, John Belushi, Chris Farley, Amy Winehouse, Judy Garland, Michael Jackson and Heath Ledger. This doesn’t even include the names of people that didn’t die directly as a result of drugs but where substance abuse indirectly led to their death such as Elvis Presley. The list goes on and on. I could fill up the page with names.

The reason that I am even discussing this is that I find it so tragic. These people were all given an amazing talent. We all have our talents, but those that choose entertainment can reach such highs and lows that their rather unique psyches often struggle with both the good times and the downtimes which they will inevitably find. As a result, they look for crutches or a new high that their normal life cannot give them.

In the end, they throw away everything. Even before their deaths, their lives are miserable. They fail to understand that their life, as it is, has value. Unless they can return to the unbelievable heights that they had reached, they become dependent on other means to simulate their previous highs. Obviously, this isn’t restricted to entertainers, but because their lives become headlines, we know them so much more easily.

What is truly sad is that there are so many of us that just have normal lives that are willing to go through so much to just keep living. I’m not just talking about those of us that are currently fighting illness, but those that work hard every day just to keep their family in food and clothing. Life is a struggle. It doesn’t matter how much money you make or how famous you are. This is not easy. Yet, somehow, we all pull up out bootstraps every day and work through it without having to “escape” through drugs or alcohol.

Certainly addiction is a powerful and awful thing. I understand that. Today we have become so politically correct that we even label it as a disease. I’ve never been fond of that dumbing up of the situation. There are those that have a greater propensity to addiction, I’ll give you that, but at the same time they weren’t born addicted. They did not feel fine, have a physical and find out that they were gravely ill. They made a choice, most of us that are fighting for our lives, didn’t.

I don’t feel sorry for Whitney Houston. I feel sorry for those she left behind. She should have thought about them before she thought about herself.


Another person I don’t feel sorry for is myself. I have been given a hand to deal with and I’m doing the best I can to squeeze every little bit out of life that I can. To that end, I changed my chemotherapy six weeks ago. Before that, my cancer numbers were getting worse and worse. I was actually starting to get a little nervous. There are only so many drugs out there for me and one of the most popular had failed. I wasn’t going to give up, but the cancer had gotten my attention.

When I received the email with my blood results a couple of weeks ago I was anxious to open it up and check that magic number next to the “lambda light chains.” This is the absolute number that let’s me know what the cancer is doing. A person without Multiple Myeloma would likely be under 2.0. Last month, my number jumped from 20 to 46.

I always hope for the best, but this time the number that I saw just didn’t look right. It just couldn’t be what I saw. I looked and then looked again. I sent an email to the person (Megan, my former Stem Cell Coordinator) that sent me the information and I asked her to confirm what I saw. It was 3.19!!!! Not 31.9 or 319, it was 3.19, almost normal. Now understand, this doesn’t mean that I am close to being cured or even getting off of chemo. What it does mean is the new combination is kicking some serious tail, better than anything that I have done before!

We will continue with the every week injections and pills for the time being. Over the next few months we will monitor my level to see if the chemo cocktail stays effective. If it does, hopefully, I will be able to reduce the frequency of the injections. Let’s all keep our fingers crossed.

If you can’t tell, I have a big smile on my face!