My Uncle and www.MyelomaForums.com

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All,

My uncle Darryl Ramsey was recently diagnosed with Stage 3 Multiple Myeloma and was told that he has aprox 1 year to live.  However, my uncle feels that Chemo and Radation are a waste of time because he now knows he has been sick with Multiple Myeloma for over 10 years and thinks he is still here today because of the fact that he was the type of person to refuse going to doctors and he for years started jucing and eating better every day.  Like most people the first thing my uncle did was a Google search and he found nothing but grimm information.  I started www.myelomaforums.com because I wanted him and others like him to have access to information from other people so that him and others like him know about all the best treatments and have access to all the answers.  However, the hardest part of getting a sucessful forum started is getting people and content.  I am here to ask everyone to please sign up with www.myelomaforums.com as well because the more your stories are out there the more people we can help.

Thanks,

Andy

P.S. Beth your’re a sweetheart and thanks for the kind email and willingness to help.

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RSS Feed aggregator for myeloma blogs

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I’m putting my links to blogs into a feed aggregator. If your blog has an RSS feed and you’d like to have it on the list, let me know. Just us the contact form.  Don’t forget to tell me what the URL for your valid RSS feed is.

http://www.myelomablogs.org/?type=archive

If you don’t have a blog or an RSS feed, why not set up one at healthblogs.org?

Find out what others are doing: myeloma treatment, chemo, coping

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Green tea polyphenols block the anticancer effects of bortezomib and other boronic acid-based proteasome inhibitors

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This caught my eye because I’ve been on Velcade before and never gave a second thought to whether or not I should not be consuming green tea/green tea products.

Blood First Edition Paper, prepublished online February 3, 2009; DOI 10.1182/blood-2008-07-171389.

Submitted July 28, 2008
Accepted January 12, 2009

Encouse B. Golden, Philip Y. Lam, Adel Kardosh, Kevin J. Gaffney, Enrique Cadenas, Stan G. Louie, Nicos A. Petasis, Thomas C. Chen, and Axel H. Schonthal*

Department of Pathology, University of Southern California (USC) Keck School of Medicine (KSOM), Los Angeles, CA, United States
Department of Molecular Pharmacology and Toxicology, USC School of Pharmacy (SoP), Los Angeles, CA, United States
Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, USC KSOM, Los Angeles, CA, United States
Department of Chemistry, USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, CA, United States
Department of Clinical Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Economics and Policy, USC SoP, Los Angeles, CA, United States
Department of Neurosurgery, USC KSOM, Los Angeles, CA, United States

* Corresponding author; email: schontha@usc.edu.

The anticancer potency of green tea and its individual components is being intensely investigated, and some cancer patients already self-medicate with this ‘miracle herb’ in hopes of augmenting the anticancer outcome of their chemotherapy. Bortezomib (Velcade®) is a proteasome inhibitor in clinical use for multiple myeloma. Here, we investigated whether the combination of these compounds would yield increased antitumor efficacy in multiple myeloma and glioblastoma cell lines in vitro and in vivo. Unexpectedly, we discovered that various green tea constituents, in particular (-)-epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) and other polyphenols with 1,2-benzenediol moieties, effectively prevented tumor cell death induced by bortezomib in vitro and in vivo. This pronounced antagonistic function of EGCG was only evident with boronic acid-based proteasome inhibitors (bortezomib, MG-262, PS-IX), but not with several non-boronic acid proteasome inhibitors (MG-132, PS-I, nelfinavir). EGCG directly reacted with bortezomib and blocked its proteasome inhibitory function; as a consequence, bortezomib could not trigger endoplasmic reticulum stress or caspase-7 activation, and did not induce tumor cell death. Taken together, our results indicate that green tea polyphenols may have the potential to negate the therapeutic efficacy of bortezomib and suggest that consumption of green tea products may be contraindicated during cancer therapy with bortezomib.

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Exactly how to throw a party

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What a great party! We had the honor of attending our sister’s 50th birthday party last night. It was perfect! The guests were a great group of people, the food was outstanding and the music was great. This one surpassed even a “Night Affair on Elm Street.”

Everyone should now go on over to the WriterHouse web site to make a donation in honor of Rachel’s birthday.

Beautifully presented food was a part of the celebration
Beautifully presented food was a part of the celebration
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2009 Myeloma update

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I don’t have a lot to blog about here because my myeloma has been stable since last fall. There’s not much there at all.  If you don’t have myeloma, I have only a little bit more than you do.

These labs were done 12/08/2008


IFE SERUM
(2) MONOCLONAL IgA-LAMBDAS DETECTED BY IFE.
SPE M-SPIKE 1                      0.17        g/dL
SPE M-SPIKE 2                      0.12        g/dL

IG FREE LIGHT CHAINS SERUM
                                                         Reference
  IG FREE LIGHT CHAIN KAPPA         *0.16mg/dL       [0.33-1.94]
  IG FREE LIGHT CHAIN LAMBDA         1.85mg/dL       [0.57-2.63]
  IG FLC KAPPA/LAMBDA RATIO         *0.09            [0.26-1.65]

IMMUNOGLOBULIN PROFILE
IMMUNOGLOBULIN G                  *374mg/dL       [588-1573]
TEST REPEATED TO CONFIRM
IMMUNOGLOBULIN A                  *415mg/dL       [46-287]
TEST REPEATED TO CONFIRM
IMMUNOGLOBULIN M                  *31mg/dL       [57-237]
TEST REPEATED TO CONFIRM
IMMUNOGLOBULIN E                   13 IU/mL       [4-269]
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There’s a moon

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This is a view of the moon through the clouds. It was such a striking image that I had to take a pic with my phone.

The moon in my back yard
The moon as seen from my back yard

There’s a moon
It’s in the sky
It’s called the moon
And everybody is there
– The B-52’s

As M knows, I can tell you (because I learned this from a recent dream) if aliens ever arrive on earth and try to kidnap us using their blue light, all we have to do is sing!  They hate music, apparently.  It drives them right off.

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I love AFLAC

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Before I got cancer, I made sure I had an AFLAC cancer policy. They’ve been great, and I recommend that everyone who is planning on having cancer  enrolls in one of their plans before getting it.  The trouble is, you don’t know if/when you might get cancer, so you better just plan for it. Expect the worst and hope for the best, some say.

I filed my claim for 2008 a week or so ago and was really surprised when I received a check in the mail for $4600. Something wasn’t right.  It should have been $900. I’ve been filing these claims for years, so I knew a mistake had been made.  I picked up the phone and called AFLAC. They’re going to investigate it and will send a letter when they figure out what happened.  Wouldn’t it be nice if they said it was a reward for making it 6 years with myeloma?

What would you do?

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