(Esquire) – In the fall of 2003, I slipped on the ice leaving my office one night. My hip hurt for a year afterward, but mostly I ignored it. When the pain didn’t go away, I saw my doctor, who ordered an MRI. I went to his office, and he told me there was a tumor on my hip. I was thirty-eight years old, pursuing a promising career in journalism, married to a woman I loved, and the first-time father of a seven-month-old daughter.

At the time I was diagnosed with the type of cancer it turned out I have, a rare and incurable form of blood cancer called multiple myeloma, I was told I had eighteen months to live. That was more than twenty-one years ago.

In those twenty-one years, I have undergone a barrage of treatments to combat my disease. They include four rounds of radiation therapy (to my hip, neck, ribs, and nose); a six-month course of weekly intravenous immunotherapy (followed by seven years of a maintenance level of that therapy taken in pill form); another two-year round of immunotherapy involving the next-generation versions of the previous drugs I was on, in pill form; a third round of immunotherapy involving two new immunotherapy drugs administered weekly by IV for two more years; and six years (and counting) of monthly IV infusions of an agent used to boost my immune system, which has been compromised both by my disease and the treatments used to fight it. But the most remarkable treatment I’ve had so far is a cutting-edge procedure, approved by the FDA for use in cases like mine only in 2022, called CAR-T therapy. This is the story of that treatment. (Read More)