🌀 Mood: Disbelief → shock → quiet courage

When my doctor called to tell me I needed to go to the hospital immediately for a blood transfusion, I was stunned. I didn’t know much about transfusions — except that it sounded serious. I had questions running through my head the whole drive over: What if I have a reaction? What if I get someone else’s disease? Is the blood even clean? I didn’t know what to expect.

My doctor had called ahead, so the ER knew I was coming — but the waiting room was packed. So I did something a little strange: I turned on the stopwatch on my phone. I wanted to know how long it would take from walking in the front door to actually getting admitted upstairs. I checked it later: 9 hours and 38 minutes.

My husband had to leave about two hours before I was admitted. He works early mornings, and once it looked like I’d be staying, I told him to go home and get rest.

I sat alone in the ER until a man approached me.
He introduced himself and said he was from Kaiser and was trying to track down my medical records.
I told him I didn’t really have any — this was my first time in a hospital for my own care.
He looked at me with a strange expression. Then he said:

“You’re too healthy. And too young. We need to figure out what’s going on.”

Eventually, I was taken upstairs to a private room, preparing to start the transfusion.
But just as I was settling into the bed, something unexpected happened.

The man from earlier — the Kaiser Advocate — suddenly appeared at my door.
He said:

“I know what’s wrong with you. And I didn’t want you to have to wait until the morning to find out.”

“You have Multiple Myeloma.”

I stared at him.

“What is that?”
“It’s a cancer of the plasma cells.”

Cancer?
I’m here for a blood transfusion… how are we talking about cancer?
There had to be a mistake.

He left, and I was alone again — this time, in full shock.

I had wondered earlier why the hospital porter brought me to the oncology floor. I even asked her, “Why am I on this floor?” It felt strange for someone just getting a transfusion. Now I knew. She knew something I didn’t.

I don’t remember when the nurses came in to start the transfusion. I think it was around 2am. They have to stay with you for the first 15 minutes to watch for reactions, but I had none. The transfusion went smoothly. I drifted in and out of sleep as the bags of blood made their way into my body.

I woke up around 7am to see a new face in my room — my new Oncologist.
Unfortunately, between the lack of sleep that I had become accustomed to, and focusing on the blood transfusion, I guess I sort of temporarily “forgot” about the diagnosis. So seeing this person in my room now was a real shock.
I looked at him and asked the question I had been holding in my heart:

“Will I survive?”
“Yes,” he said.

I cried.

Then he started talking about chemotherapy. And I broke down again — not just from fear, but because the first thing that hit me was:

Please, no… not my hair.

Thankfully, he told me that the chemotherapy used for Multiple Myeloma typically does not cause hair loss.
It was a small relief — but I clung to it. At this point, I’m holding onto any positive I can.

He said a lot more, but I honestly couldn’t absorb it all. It was too much. Too fast.
All I could think was:

How am I going to tell my husband his wife has cancer?
How did we get here?
I needed to understand — because this was a leap I couldn’t make:
From back pain… to cancer… and everything in between.