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Michelle Maria and Dr. Robert Vescio
Dr. Robert Vescio (RV): Can you tell me kind of how you – or what you felt like when you first found out that you had this multiple myeloma?
Michelle Maria (MM): I was younger and I was in pretty good shape and pretty active and all of a sudden I’m noticing, like, I can’t catch my breath walking up a small hill. Like a month later, I started getting huge bruises, like the size of grapefruits, and so I actually went to my internist, did some blood tests and I went home that day and told my husband, I said, “I think there’s something pretty wrong.” The following day he called me and told me that I had multiple myeloma.
RV: And were you, yourself, pretty worried?
MM: I think I was more worried about my children because at the time I was diagnosed they were eight and 12.
RV: Right.
MM: My youngest one was crying a lot. You know, for her just the thought of cancer meant that I’m going to die. So, you know, one day I had to just tell her, “You know, no, mommy’s going to go through this so that I can be around a lot longer.”
RV: How do you think your kids have, kind of, dealt with this whole issue – the whole problem?
MM: So, I do see that it’s still always a worry in the back of their mind, but they’re very supportive. Throughout it all, my husband and I tried to keep life really normal, as much as we could. When I was bald they would ask me at times, “Mommy, how can you joke about being bald?” and I said, “Well, you know, I’m not going to cry about it. You know, I don’t have hair right now but hair doesn’t make me who I am.” You know, I’d rather try to have more of a normal life. You know? I don’t want my whole life to be this multiple myeloma.
RV: Right.
MM: It can be a part of my life.
RV: Right.
MM: But - and I don’t want it to be, you know, where my family or my children are thinking about it all the time either.
RV: I know you’ve had the two transplants, but after the first one then when you heard that it grew back…
MM: It had only been, gosh, maybe 9-10 months, something like that, since I was really in remission. I was feeling good and then it was back. So, that was difficult. My oldest daughter, who was a freshman in high school at the time, she saw my face in the rear view mirror and she knew something was wrong. And when she got in the car, the first thing she said to me was, “Mommy is your cancer back?” And I pulled over in the parking lot there and we both cried and I told her, “You know, it’s going to be okay.”
RV: I think I heard about you and I knew about you and I think I would say we were all pretty nervous at that point, because that’s pretty scary to have it come back that fast.
MM: Isn’t it hard for you to, like, deal with everybody that has cancer? I mean, everybody you see has multiple myeloma.
RV: Yeah. Yeah, it’s hard. You take it home with you. You know, things don’t always work out the way you want them to, but sometimes they do and you kind of grab hold of those and, you know…
MM: Well, just so you know, you do make a difference. You know, I am very fortunate that you’re my doctor.
