Morning call

 "Good morning, this is Doctor (fill in name here). The results of your blood test have come back and it indicates you may have myeloma"

It's when you get a doctor's call the morning after an annual health check that your Spidey senses start tingling. But your next question is 'And what is myeloma?' because you almost certainly haven't heard of it before. 

I had been on a great holiday in the US and came back to a scheduled annual health check at our local GP. I felt healthy and ticked it off as another example of doing the right and sensible thing. It turned out to be very sensible, because the first symptom for some sufferers is a spinal collapse, which nobody wants.

So this, I found out, is what myeloma is. It starts in your bone marrow, where blood cells are produced. For some reason, the cells that should become plasma cells start replicating much too fast because they have suffered a mutation. They carry on like the buckets an mops around Mickey Mouse in the Sorcerer's Apprentice until your bones are all bunged up with extra nonsense cells and other bits of you are starting to feel the strain. Plasma cells should make up about 2-3% of your cells. In my bones they were 23%.

The key thing that starts to become a problem is that all these non-functioning cells and the antibodies they produce (in fact, non-functioning antibody lookalikes) start to interfere with the bone replacement process and you end up with lesions inside your bones. For which, read holes. Holes big enough to be seen on a scan. I have them all over. I want a picture of the scan. I am going to name it Mr Cheeseman.