DESCRIPTION
A regimen of darzalex, vercade and dexamethasone teamed up for a chemotherapy regimen that helped Gregory Proctor survive multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer. After going into remission, his health improved in a big way with a stem cell transplant.
In the spring of 2011, Greg’s journey began with some lower back pain. After about a month, it reached a point in which he could not get out of bed. One morning he had to literally crawl downstairs and have his wife help into their care for a drive to Greg’s primary care physician. Subsequent tests only indicated that he should see a specialist.
Greg Proctor underwent what is known as a non-contrast MRI, which identified a mass the size of an egg in his upper right hip, but the scan could not determine if the mass was benign or cancerous. He had to wait an additional three weeks for a more definitive contrast MRI, which lit up like a Christmas tree, indicating that Greg had cancer throughout his lower extremities. That brought on more blood work, which led to a bone marrow biopsy. Greg said this was the most painful thing he had ever been through. He regrets getting only a local anesthetic. After the biopsy, he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma IGA Cappa P-17. This meant that Greg was high-risk and needed chemotherapy immediately. At the same time, his oncologist advised Greg to get his affairs in order.
As he prepped for chemo, Greg was practically immobilized. The tumor went across his sciatic nerve, making it almost impossible to walk, tie his shoes or balance.
His regimen was darzalex, vercade and dexamethasone, a five-day-a-week regimen. The darzalex and the vercade were meant to be inhibitors that attack different parts of the protein as it pertains to fighting multiple myeloma. The dexamethasone is a steroid, which helped Greg to eat quite a bit because doctors wanted to gain weight before his stem cell transplant.
Greg Proctor achieved remission in October 2021, and his stem cell transplant commenced the following February. Prior to the stem cell transplant, he was injected with a high dose of melphalan. It killed off his immune system, but properly prepared him for the stem cell transplant.
Greg was injected with four million stem cells, which flowed through his bloodstream trying to get back into bone marrow. That temporarily left his body in a state of uncertainty. He experienced fever and diarrhea and upset stomach and nausea over the next ten days in the hospital. That left him with engraftment syndrome, which played havoc with the stem cells and his bone marrow. All told, Greg was in the hospital 21 difficult days before he was discharged.
He went home, but was low on energy. He had many days of going from the bed to the couch and the couch to the bed. In May, he felt like his body was starting to return to normal.
Years later, Greg still goes through chemotherapy twice a month, but if he was 100 percent before his diagnosis, he now feels at close to 90 percent. Mentally, physically, psychologically, he is not quite where he used to be and admits he never will be, but Greg Proctor is very to be alive.
By way of advice, he tells anyone with a cancer diagnosis to never give up. He says once you allow doubt, insecurity and fear into your mind, the battle becomes much harder. That said, he suggests anyone on a cancer journey to enjoy each day and never take life for granted.
Additional Resources:
Gregory’s podcast: www.k2tcpodcast.com
Support Group:
Leukemia and Lymphoma Society: www.lls.org
TRANSCRIPT
Bruce Morton: This is the Cancer Interviews podcast, and I’m your host, Bruce Morton. Multiple Myeloma is a rare blood cancer that forms in a white blood cell called a plasma cell. Our guest was diagnosed with this cancer, has overcome it, and has a powerful story to tell. He is Gregory Proctor of San Antonio, Texas, and his story should resonate with anyone diagnosed with cancer. So here he is, Gregory Proctor and Gregory, welcome to Cancer Interviews.
Gregory Proctor: Thank you for having me, Bruce.
BM: What we like to do with any of our guests is learn more about their lives, exclusive of their cancer journey, so if you would, Gregory, tell us about where you are from, what you do for work and fun.
GP: I am a cancer survivor. Professionally I am a project control specialist, so I do a lot of work for the Department of Energy, and a lot of commercial sectors, domestically as well as abroad. I am a podcaster and a co-founder of TrueSpot Technologies.
BM: As for your cancer journey, there was this unfortunate juncture in which we know that physically something isn’t normal. For you, what was it and how did it manifest itself?
GP: It started to manifest in April or May of 2021 with some lower back pain. I was doing a lot of sitting down as podcasters do, and that lower back pain was persistent. After about a month, it reached a point in which I couldn’t get out of bed. At that point it was fairly catastrophic because my lower extremities, I could not move.
BM: Everybody with a cancer journey has a different story and one of the variables in that complex equation is how quickly they seek medical attention, or lack of quickness. In your case, were you quick to seek medical attention?
GP: When you wake up in the morning and your lower extremities cannot move, your legs cannot move, you’re looking at your body wondering what is going on, it is almost like an out of mind, out of body experience, the first thing you want to do is seek medical attention right away, which is exactly what I did. I managed to muster up the courage to get myself out of bed, put on some clothes, literally crawl downstairs to our vehicle and get myself over to my primary health care doctor. His assumption during the initial diagnosis was I slipped a disc or pulled a muscle, and of course, they did blood work and so much and so on. For me, the next 48 hours after having that examination, the pain never went away. It just continued to persist and became more intensified and agonizing and I knew I had to seek additional medical attention.
BM: So, you went to a specialist.
GP: Yes. So, the specialist brought me into his office, examined me and we ran x-rays. Then he said I needed to go in for an MRI. That was the first significant test after I sought medical attention to try to figure out what was going on with me. The MRI that they ran was a non-contrast MRI. They were able to identify that there was a mass on my upper right hip. They said they cannot really define whether it was benign or cancerous, so they said I would have to come back for a contrast MRI, and it was very frustrating early on to know there was something going on, but we were unaware as to what it truly was. It took almost another three weeks before I could get in for the contrast MRI for them to actually tell us that we needed to see an oncologist.
BM: We’re confident you’ll be able to learn some tips and tools to help you through your personal cancer journey, but first we’d like to invite you to please give us a ‘like’, leave a comment or review below and share this story with your friends. Kindly click on the Subscribe button below and click on the bell icon, so you’ll be notified when we release our next cancer interview. And if you or a loved one are facing a cancer diagnosis, please click on the link in the description and Show Notes below to check out our free guide, “The Top Ten Things I Wish I Knew When I First Got Cancer.”
Now, Gregory, you’re about to embark on three-week waiting period. I cannot imagine that was mentally or emotionally easy at all because, as you said, you something is wrong at this point, but you don’t know what. What were those three weeks like?
GP: Those three weeks were filled with anxiety, concern, worry, sense of doubt because I had always lived my life being very healthy, athletic and just trying to live somewhat of a prosperous life through health; but when I was going through that period of time, I just started reflecting on what have I done wrong. You begin to have a sense of insecurity and doubt. At those stages, you don’t want to start to go into a depression mode or dark stage in your life, but you have those thoughts cross your mind, and you ask, “What am I going to do next if this happens to be the worst-case scenario?”
BM: So, at this point, we’re not at a medical phase yet, we are at sort of a hearts and minds phase. Were there any external sources that helped you deal with that?
GP: I had friends, local friends, that were obviously praying for my wife and I, my family was also praying. My faith is based on Christianity, being a Southern Baptist, so I tried to pour as much energy as I could into my faith at that point in time; but overall, faith being one component, you’re still living the vast reality of not knowing what is really happening within those first couple weeks. For me and my wife, it just became very difficult for us to cope with these things. We were starting to hear words like lymphoma, Multiple Myeloma, it could be this, it could be that, and which path are we going to have to go. So, it wasn’t until we got around to having that second MRI, and that was the catalyst that really struck a chord for us.
BM: Okay, a massive two-part question. The contrast MRI. What did it reveal and based on that, what did your doctor tell you?
GP: We’re still at the specialist at this point in time, so we went in for the MRI, my wife was with me, and I want to express something very clearly and want to be transparent. A lot of times we have a sixth sense in our mind, and it tells us that something is going to go wrong. You just start to have a more clear awareness of things around you in your environment. So, I had the MRI machine and I just looked at the technician, and I wanted to ask her so desperately, “Can you tell me anything?” And of course, they can’t, but the expression on her face said it all. So, when we went back to the specialist and we stepped into his office, it wasn’t even five minutes. He looked at my wife and I and said, “Mr. and Mrs. Proctor, you guys need to see an oncologist right now.” We asked him if he could go into any detail. He said he would prefer not to because the findings are beyond the scope of his practice. He said we needed to see an oncologist, and suggested a friend of his. That did not work for us, so we sought other oncology expertise, and we are thankful the circumstances happened the way they did because as people say, count your blessings. For everyone that is on my team of eight doctors, I count my blessings every day because they were brought into my life to save my life.
BM: And when you saw that oncologist, I am guessing in very short order, that’s when you got the bad news.
GP: Well, still had more tests to go through. The contrast MRI lit up like a Christmas tree. There were signs of cancer literally throughout my lower extremities, which was in my right hip area as well as throughout my body for bone lesions, which multiple myeloma does. We went through another series of blood work, more scans and then of course, a bone marrow biopsy. For me, that was the first time I went through that procedure, which was the most painful, excruciating procedure that I had had done in my entire life because I had never been in a hospital or broken any bones.throughout my life. Having someone stick a needle and extracting the bone marrow tissue and you are only on local anesthesia, if I had it to do again, I would always err on the side of caution. When I hear people say they have they just been diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma, I tell them if they are getting a bone marrow biopsy to make sure they do it under anesthesia, don’t do it locally because it is excruciating. It is the worst tolerable that I could ever imagine going through. To answer your question, when we went back in, which was after the bone marrow biopsy, the doctors came in and said he had diagnosed me with multiple myeloma IGA Cappa P-17 two mutated genes. This was all Greek to my wife and I. What that translated into was that I was high-risk and that I needed to start on chemo immediately. Then my oncologist told me to get my affairs in order. To me, that was the catalyst. It took my wife and I back as if we had been hit by a 30-foot wave and we knew we were drowning because that was the scariest thing that anyone had said to us. We knew the cancer existed, but being told to get my affairs in order made me feel as though I was going to die.
BM: It’s obvious when you get this news, it’s horrific, as it is for anyone receiving this news; but each of us is different, our diagnoses are different. Obviously, this is terrible news, but we each react differently to it. With faith as one of those things in your toolbox, how did you react?
GP: It was too surreal. We were dealing with something that neither one of us had any experience on, or anyone in our family had any experience on, and so the surrealness of it as it became inevitable, it really put us in a situation to where we went into that depressive stage for three or four days. I was diagnosed on a Friday, so within that 48-hour period, the best thing we could do was consult with not only our pastors and ministers, but also our family and friends that wanted to wrap their arms around us and give us a sense of comfort; but we were just not prepared mentally and not prepared physically for the throes of what we were about to encounter starting that following Monday.
BM: Gregory, I am survivor of prostate cancer, which is a relatively high-profile cancer, if you will. As a result, there exist many support avenues for prostate cancer survivors. However, multiple myeloma does not have the same profile. What was it like when you sought support?
GP: I am glad you bring that question up. A lot of times when people are diagnosed, it’s something that don’t expect will ever happen to you, so you have this invincibility as you go through life. As such, you hope you are never on the receiving end of a cancer diagnosis. So, when you are hit with a cancer diagnosis, it’s just like starting grade school. You have to get yourself educated, but you don’t know where to look because you don’t have these tools in your toolkit, and you don’t have your family or friends who have gone through this experience that can share their wisdom and knowledge with you. Therefore, you are still like a fish out of water. For my wife and I, we just felt like even though we felt like we were drowning with this devastating news, we still didn’t know where to get educated. Eventually we figured it out, but when you are in the throes of this within 48 hours of being diagnosed, you don’t have a lot of time to do very much. You only have time to react and just try to get through the process to survive, and it wasn’t until about two weeks later that we were told by a friend that we have to get past this depressive stage. You guys have got to focus in on the things that you guys do best, and just by her saying those words, pushed the envelope for me to get back to what I do best. For me, being a project manager and working with Fortune 500 companies and making companies billions of dollars, I said I have got to be able to do this for myself. I have got to be the project, and my wife has got to be the project manager so that basically we can divide and conquer and take on this disease and not let this disease take on us. As soon as we got ourselves calibrated to be able to do that, the whole dynamic changed for us. That’s what I mentioned earlier. The educational piece, the awareness piece and folks being able to understand what’s available out there, a lot of time you don’t want to have to go to a website or a chat group because it’s very depressive. You want to find a sense of hope and admiration and uplifting that’s going to give you a sense of peace of mind and not be in throes of all the negativity. You are already in negativity from Day One when you are diagnosed. I think that’s important for anyone diagnosed for any cancer to know that you are not in this alone and there is a lot of information out there, but you need to be aware of where you go to get that information, and certainly if you can latch on to someone who has the experience, you are going to come out a lot better.
BM: I want to talk about the chemotherapy part of your journey, but there is another part of your story that we briefly referenced earlier to which I want to circle back. You had mentioned being immobilized at the very outset. In terms of your mobility, were you ambulatory, were you confined to a wheelchair at the time you started the chemo regimen?
GP: To paint the picture for your listeners, the tumor was the size of an egg on my upper right hip area, and it was going across my sciatic nerve. It radiated pain down my right leg where it made it almost impossible for me to walk or tie my shoes or being able to balance. Then of course being across my sciatic nerve and all of the bone lesions that I had throughout my body, that cause me an extensive amount of pain as I was trying to sleep and lay down horizontally as opposed to being vertical. So, it caused a lot of immobility and I’ll say partial immobility in the aspect of trying to do things on my own. Having that appreciation psychologically going through my mind as a guy who was always self-sufficient and independent, played a psychological torment on me because I had to rely on my wife and friends and family to be in front of me as I am going down the stairs so I don’t fall, helping me tie my shoes, helping me get dressed and those things were just something that I knew in my mind that I wanted to get beyond because of the independence that I always had throughout my entire life. I didn’t want the disease to rule my life that way.
BM: Not a pleasant topic, but what was the toughest part of chemo?
GP: The toughest part was, number one, not knowing. I mean, it took us a little bit of time to get up to speed. You hear stories about people going through chemo, the side effects, knowing various things that occur when going through it, but for me, the toughest thing was that for the first two and a half months, I was on a five day a week regimen. That left me in a fog, left me in a phase of not knowing of being very coherent or being in my life as I needed to be for trying to make decisions and do things that my wife and I enjoy because I just didn’t have the mental capacity or the physical strength as well.
BM: How about the very notion of eating? I have heard many times that when going through chemo, it is unpleasant to eat or drink because everything tastes like metal.
GP: My regimen was darzalex, vercade, dexamethasone. Obviously, vercade and the darzalex are two kinds of inhibitors that attack different parts of the protein as pertains to fighting myeloma; but the dexamethasone is a steroid. So, for me I started out this journey at about 175 pounds. With the steroids, I was starting to eat like the Incredible Hulk because the doctors said they wanted to make sure I put on a little weight before my stem cell transplant. We know that’s a long ways out, but they didn’t want to risk the prospect of my losing weight before the transplant because they wanted me to be as stable as possible. For me, my overall essence of appetite actually increased and went up. There were other side effects tied to the three-drug regimen I was on, but certainly I didn’t lose sight of eating like other patients.
BM: And if you would, tell us about the stem cell transplant.
GP: My stem cell transplant commenced on February 9, 2022. This was after I had been under treatment from July 20, 2021 through December, and I actually achieved remission in October of 2021, which was a very significant accomplishment for me. We always wanted to achieve remission prior to the stem cell transplant. I spent approximately eleven days going through what they call ‘hitting the bottom,’ which in simplistic terms means the first day they injected me with a high dose of melphalan. What it does is, it kills off all of your immune system, and for me it felt like they putting me into a coma. Once I was hit with a high dose of melphalan, my body just felt warm on the inside, I felt very tired. Sleepy and so, that was a weird sensational feeling for me. When they came in and injected me with my stem cells on February 9, my body, as most people who go through a stem cell transplant, went through a rebirth process. You are injected with four million stem cells, so now they are flowing through your bloodstream trying to get back into your bone marrow, so my body was going through all types of uncertainty as if it was fighting a disease. There were fevers and diarrhea and upset stomach and nausea, you name it, it was all happening over the next seven to ten days I was in the hospital; but it wasn’t quite as significant through the first eleven days as it was when I was discharged on the eleventh day. For about 12-14 hours, I had to turn back around and go back into the hospital because I was running such a high fever and went back in for another eight-day period as they ran through all these series of tests only to result in engraftment syndrome. This involves the stem cells that were in my bloodstream are starting reimpregnate themselves back into my bone marrow and therefore my body didn’t know how to respond to that because normally your stem cells are inside your bone marrow. It was a very difficult time and overall, I was in the hospital for about 21 days total.
BM: And yet, with all of that, things veered in a good direction. When did you feel your journey was starting to turn the corner, and again I ask, how did that manifest itself?
GP: I really had to focus on trying to add a sense of awareness, a sense of inspiration, a sense of hope for individuals that were diagnosed, and for me by sharing my journey, I would help others lives. My journey of being able to understand the significance of a turning point started very early on which is why I took to social media and became very, very transparent in regards to sharing all of the details and leaving it in such a positive light so that people would understand that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, there is a beacon of hope out there, you just have to endure the process. But, for the month of March, I could only walk about 15 miles. That was in the period of one month. I went from the bed to the couch, the bed to the couch because I didn’t have much energy. My body was still trying to rebuild. You know, a baby is trying to do things right after they’re born, eating and so forth. That’s what my body was going through, except I was in my fifties at the time, and yet my body feels infantile. That first month for me was extremely difficult, very painful. It wasn’t until like April or May when I could start to feel the energy, the significance of starting to reboot itself and kick itself back into kind of a normal routine where things were able to kind of feel better and I was able to have a little more energy to get outside of my house and be able to walk and have little discomfort. So, those were the things that the significance of those things are very significant psychologically and physically, but where I am today, it really is worth the journey based on being diagnosed with such a horrific disease.
BM: Gregory, as we continue on this positive path regarding your journey, if pre-diagnosis could be thought of as 100 percent, these days, how close are you to 100 percent?
GP: That’s a very good question, Bruce, I question that a lot of times myself. I am still in chemotherapy two times a month now. I would say I am somewhere in the 90 percentile, and the reason why I say that is because you don’t get everything back that you lose, let’s face it. When you go through something such as a horrific diagnosis and you go through something such a stem cell transplant, sometimes your mechanical skills, your motor skills, your way of thinking, the clarification you would always have, the spontaneity you would normally have, you know, I think a lot of that is still there, but it is not at the instant reactive pace that I used to work at. So, for me, it has been a little bit of an adjustment, mentally, physically and psychologically for me to say this might be as good as it is going to get based on where I was, but I have to be able to accept that and know that the one positive thing in life for ‘em right now is that I am still living. I cannot discount the gratitude that I am still living and knowing that I still have an opportunity to elevate my voice to help others and be that beacon of life to be sure that others have the information and awareness to be able to fight this disease head-on because it is something I don’t wish on anybody. You know, this disease is probably one of the four most expensive and hideous cancers that are out there today.
BM: Gregory, we are going to wrap up now. We want you to picture yourself with someone who has just been diagnosed with multiple myeloma. There might be many things you would want to impart, but there was one point that you wanted to make sure got across, what would it be?
GP: It’s been a mantra for me. I think it is very important for people to know that they should never give up. Don’t ever give up because once you let doubt, insecurity and fear get into your mind, it becomes a much harder battle, and so you to try to find that mental fortitude and that’s why I have always preached don’t give up because I think that’s very, very important to get your mind right even though things around you are totally chaotic and out of your control, but if you get your mind right and deal with taking it one day at a time, you can appreciate every moment, you can prioritize your health, you can spend time with your loved ones because you don’t know when your ticket may be called and most importantly, you cannot take life for granted.
BM: Excellent. Gregory, thanks so much for an extremely graphic recitation of your journey and your message for others. We really appreciate the time you have taken with us. Gregory Proctor, San Antonio, Texas, thanks very much for being with us on Cancer Interviews.
GP: Thank you very much for having me.
BM: And that’s gonna wrap up this episode. We want to remind you as we always do, and as articulated by Gregory Proctor, that you are not alone in this journey. There are plenty of people out there like Gregory who have a message that is uplifting as you go through your cancer journey, you or a loved one. So, until next time, we’ll see you on down the road.
Additional Resources:
Gregory’s podcast: www.k2tcpodcast.com
SHOW NOTES
TITLE: Gregory Proctor, Multiple Myeloma Survivor – San Antonio, Texas, USA
Gregory Proctor first experienced lower back pain, which worsened to the point at which he could no longer walk. An MRI revealed a mass on his upper right hip, which became a diagnosis of multiple myeloma and a warning from his doctor that he should “get his affairs in order.” However, through an aggressive chemotherapy regimen, a stem cell transplant and his faith, Gregory is now in remission. This is his story.
Additional Resources:
Gregory’s podcast: www.k2tcpodcast.com
Time Stamps:
02:15 Gregory says his cancer journey began with lower back pain.
03:10 The pain worsened, and he became immobilized.
04:45 An MRI identified a mass on his upper right hip.
11:10 Gregory says a second MRI necessitated a bone marrow biopsy.
13:05 An oncologist gave Gregory the bad news.
14:17 His reaction to the diagnosis.
19:57 Describes his pain BEFORE his chemo regimen.
21:28 Gregory describes the toughest part of his chemo regimen.
23:51 His stem cell transplant.
28:50 Recalls his cancer journey turning the corner.
30:31 Gregory says his health is at about 90 percent of what it was pre-diagnosis.
32:35 His message to those diagnosed with multiple myeloma.
KEYWORDS (tags):
cancer
multiple myeloma
bone lesions
bone marrow biopsy
chemotherapy
stem cell transplant
bruce morton
darzalex
vercade
dexamethasone
gregory proctor
melphalan
engraphmic syndrome
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