Coffee with All4Cure - Terry (2/3)

I have a friend who was diagnosed with myeloma about two or three years before me and went through a similar treatment. Back then, I knew he had cancer because I followed him on Facebook but I did not know what kind of cancer it was. He was posting pictures of him going into the hospital and getting stem cells. I remember thinking “I wonder if he's even gonna make it through this” because it sounded super intense. When I found out I had myeloma in 2019 he was living in Hawaii. I reached out to him because I knew he went through something similar. That’s when I found out we had the exact same disease! I would say he became my myeloma coach because he had experienced it all. The best advice he gave me was to listen to my doctor and try to stay healthy. He told me it's really important to go into the stem cell transplant as physically fit as you can because it's a big challenge. Another thing he told me was to stay positive. I didn't think about mortality so much before my diagnosis, but it's really easy to let your mind wander. It helped me to have somebody I could talk to who’d already had it and to see that he's alive and living a normal life.