47-Year-Old Father Finds Out Doctors Repeatedly Misdiagnose Back Pain, Finally Receives Blood Cancer Diagnosis: ‘I Regret Not Pushing Harder’

Severe back and rib pain prompted McGovern to visit his general practitioner several times over the course of the pandemic. Only when McGovern contracted pneumonia and pleurisy did he get the blood tests that revealed a much deeper issue: multiple myeloma.

Multiple myeloma is the third most common type of blood cancer, and the father of two began treatment in April  just a week after being diagnosed. McGovern's condition is not curable, but there are treatment options that can prolong patient’s lives and address symptoms. McGovern is scheduled to undergo high-dose chemotherapy and stem cell transplantation in the coming weeks.

McGovern wants to use his experience to promote awareness and encourage individuals to be quicker to address alarming symptoms. One of the core challenges of treating multiple myeloma is that the disease's symptoms can be incorrectly attributed to more minor conditions, or just the wear and tear of aging.

“I regret not pushing harder to get to the bottom of these things. If I had heard of myeloma, I would have mentioned it to the GP, but, unfortunately, I hadn’t,” he said.

Multiple myeloma is a form of blood cancer, meaning that it is also hard to identify because there is no tumor, and no specific area of the body to look for it. As is true of most cancers, early diagnosis is the key to effective treatment.

The Conditions That Preceed Multiple Myeloma

In an interview with SurvivorNet, Dr. Jens Hillengass explained that two conditions typically precede full-blown multiple myeloma. The first is called MGUS, standing for monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance. In patients with MGUS,  small amounts of the same abnormal proteins that occur in multiple myeloma are present in the blood stream, but the number of plasma cells in the bone marrow is almost a healthy amount. The second condition, called smoldering myeloma, is the disease that occurs in between MGUS and multiple myeloma. In the case of smoldering myeloma, the blood stream contains greater amounts of abnormal proteins, and the plasma cells in the bone marrow are closer to those in a multiple myeloma patient.

Neither of these conditions have distinct symptoms, so they are usually only diagnosed by chance during routine blood and urine tests. Patients who have either of these conditions will be monitored to make sure they don't develop multiple myeloma, but Dr. Hillengass emphasized that these conditions only marginally increase the likelihood of developing multiple myeloma. Even though these conditions almost always precede the disease, most patients who have MGUS or smoldering myeloma never develop multiple myeloma.

A panel of experts discuss the racial disparities in myeloma patients.

Understanding Multiple Myeloma

Multiple myeloma is a type of blood cancer. According to Dr. Nina Shah of the UCSF Medical Center, blood cancers primarily impact the bone marrowwhere blood cells are produced. With blood cancers, there is no solid tumor, but there are complications in each of the kinds of blood cells (red blood cells, platelets, and white blood cells). Dr. Shah put it simply in an interview with SurvivorNet, saying, "One cell got really selfish and decided that it needed to take up all the resources of everybody else, and in doing so, took up space and energy from the rest of the body."

Multiple myeloma has several important risk factors to be aware of. Age, gender (with males being more likely), and precursor diseases all effect your likelihood of contracting multiple myeloma. But race and ethnicity are some of the most significant predictors of risk. Dr. Hillengass told Survivornet that the risk of an Asian person developing the disease is 1 in 30,000, the risk of a white person developing the disease is 1 in 20,000, and the risk of a Black person developing multiple myeloma is approximately 1 in 7,000.

Dr. Nina Shah explains the symptoms of myeloma, and the challenge of diagnosing them.

Multiple Myeloma Symptoms

As Dave McGovern's story illustrates, the symptoms of multiple myeloma are difficult to identify. Symptoms like fatigue, nausea, and constipation can point to a wide range of different conditions. Other common symptoms include:

• Weakness, dizziness, and trouble breathing (all signs of anemia, a condition caused by a low red blood cell count)
• Bone pain
• Changes in urinary habits (urinating too much or not enough)
• Muscle cramps
• Vomiting
• Confusion
• Frequent infections

 

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