05/12/2024
Below is an honest and uplifting account of MM patient Mimi Laffan’s story.
"I have been blessed throughout my treatment"
Mimi Laffan has been through her multiple myeloma treatment and is back where she belongs - in the gym.
Prior to her diagnosis, she had been feeling fitter and stronger than ever, regularly lifting heavy weights in her local gym in Waterford City. That’s why learning she had multiple myeloma came as such a shock, she says.
As a nurse, Mimi noticed her blood results were “a bit off”. Having never had a chest infection, she had three bad ones in a single year. “It was taking me more than three weeks to get over them. Looking at my blood results, I could see my body wasn’t making cells properly. They weren’t far off normal, but they weren’t my normal. But I didn’t have any tiredness, no unusual symptoms. I am 56 and I was menopausal so any signs I did have were all explainable by that. And I was training very well so I was the fittest I had ever been.”
But this was during the pandemic, so it was difficult to get a GP appointment. Mimi eventually saw her own GP in September 2023. “She said ‘look, I'm not particularly worried about you, but I understand and I will send you for a haematology consult’.” A week before her consultant appointment, Mimi was lifting 100kg in the gym when she got a pain in her hip.
“I just dropped my form a little bit on the last lift. I knew it was just a muscle pain, I always pull the same muscle.” Like her GP, the haematologist wasn’t overly concerned until she mentioned this pain. Originally thinking she had monoclonal gammopathy of unknown significance (MGUS) as her paraprotein levels weren’t that high, when he heard she had pain, even though it was just muscle pain, he decided to send her for the full array of tests anyway.
“I was still absolutely gobsmacked by MGUS, that there was anything wrong with me, because I was feeling quite powerful at the time. I just thought they would tell me I had some vitamin or mineral deficiency. Then everything came back normal, except that my bone marrow had 80% plasma cells. So that kicked me immediately into full-blown multiple myeloma.”
As a nurse, Mimi knew exactly what this meant. “I would have been familiar with multiple myeloma from a renal point of view because I was a clinical nurse manager on a renal ward. So my experience with multiple myeloma at that stage would have been seeing people coming in with a nephropathy after their proteins had blocked up their kidneys.” This was 30 years ago, when effective treatments didn’t really exist - many of the patients Mimi saw soon passed away. “These patients didn't survive. They maybe lasted a year or two because we only had two or three drugs. And I don't remember an awful lot of them having stem cell transplants at that stage. They were all older and frailer in my memory. It was the last thing I thought I'd have.”
Her treatment began almost immediately. Four months of induction treatment involving quadruplet therapy was followed by a stem cell transplant in St James's Hospital.
“I got the best treatment that's available. I hate saying this, I've been blessed. I've been blessed throughout the treatment. I became neutropenic after cyclophosphamide and I developed one infection but apart from that, the treatment has been good and I've been able to remain active during it.”
Throughout this time, Mimi threw herself into fundraising for Multiple Myeloma Ireland, organising successful events for every Sunday in September during Blood Cancer Awareness Month. These walks and runs were organised with local GAA clubs and saw huge turnouts and thousands of euro raised. She also helped to organise a sponsored indoor cycle at her gym, entitled “Miles for Mimi”, which was a huge success.
“Other gyms loaned their bikes and we decided we'd get as many people as possible cycling for 90 minutes and just see how many miles for myeloma we could get done. And so we covered 577 km in 90 minutes, between everybody that was there. I think there were over 120 people in the gym that day, the energy that was there was just amazing.”
The support from the wider community for all the fundraising events was phenomenal, she says. “Everything, the cakes, the tea. There were so many people involved on so many different levels. Every week, every event we had, somebody approached me to say, I have myeloma as well. And we had the chat about it. One Sunday, a woman came up to me and she said, I saw this being advertised and my brother-in-law has actually been diagnosed with it, so I came along. So it was very powerful all around and very emotional.”
In total, she has helped raise almost €24,000. Mimi can’t thank her family and friends enough, saying each of them helped organise and run the fundraising events - her sister started a WhatsApp group for family and friends that grew to almost 100 members.
But it hasn’t been just about raising money - Mimi says her goal has been to raise awareness of multiple myeloma so that people with it don’t feel so alone. “And I'm delighted with the care I got, but there’s more there that could be done. We need more clinical trials and earlier access to new treatments. Other countries in Europe have access to treatments that we don’t have here.” She also believes effort needs to be made in terms of building a registry of multiple myeloma patients.
Mimi is now back lifting heavy in the gym, and says she feels fantastic. “I feel great. I still have two more cycles of chemo to do and I will be on immunotherapy again for Christmas, but I will get through that then and hopefully have a long remission. I'm praying and hoping for a long remission.”
