Fuck fuck fuck. Fuck 2018, fuck cancer. At Popou's house for our usual Sunday visit when my baby brother called our dad from Korea (tech work for the satellite feed for the Olympics) to tell him that he'll be heading back to CT this coming weekend, and not to worry too much but he has a plasma cancer issue called smoldering myeloma, a slow-incubating precursor to multiple myeloma, and the doctor said he could wait until after the Olympics to come home and start treatment but he decided to start right away.
The story he told about how it was diagnosed didn't add up when I looked it up on the Mayo and Johns Hopkins websites, but I kept that to myself until just now, when my mom and I had a long talk.
He told a gentle fiction to our dad. He has in fact been pre-cancerous for a couple of years, known it and been monitored regularly and told no one but his husband. This isn't smoldering, it's active multiple myeloma. My mom is flying back to CT a couple of days after he gets there to be with him for the first round. And I want to smash something, but there's nothing to smash.