When I got up on Thursday, May 31, 2018, I knew something was wrong. Really wrong. I had begun to suffer from fatigue early in the year – my doctor was trying to figure out why I was so anemic all the time – but nothing like I felt that day. I was so fatigued I couldn’t stand up long enough to take a shower.

My boss at the time was preparing documents for a meeting, so I headed in to work to help him complete everything, and then had my husband drive me to Emergency at the nearest hospital.

We spent quite a few hours there having much bloodwork and having gallons of saline pumped into my body to help my failing kidneys. Kidney failure??? Yes. It turns out that I was suffering renal failure, but my only symptom was thirst. I put that down to wintertime and working in an older professional building downtown. Wrong!!!

In the evening, the on-call hematologist came to see me and said that I had Multiple Myeloma. I had no idea what that was. However, when she said “We usually treat cancers such as this with chemotherapy …”. My brain stopped processing after the word “chemotherapy”.

Cancer. So that was it. The reason for the thirst, the renal failure, the high calcium count in my blood and the anemia. Not only cancer – an incurable cancer.

That day, my life changed forever.