Lee May's friends tried to assure him he'd only broken a rib on their marathon bicycle ride. But May, saddled with bone pain and fatigue, was certain it was more. He underwent testing at UCSF Health, including a bone marrow biopsy, then left on a long-planned vacation to Venice.
"I knew it was going to be bad, but I didn't know what it was," he said.
The diagnosis was indeed dire: multiple myeloma, an aggressive blood cancer that can be challenging to treat and prone to relapse. Experts gave him two to four years, at most.
That was 14 years ago.
Since then, he's been on multiple drug cocktail regiments, undergone a stem cell transplant, and done CAR-T therapy.
"Every time I relapsed, there would be a new course of therapy, a new drug would be available," he says. "My survival relates directly to NIH (National Institutes of Health) research and funding. If it hadn't been for that, I wouldn't be here. Science moves forward with NIH funding."
His physician, Jeffrey Wolf , MD, a hematologist and oncologist at UCSF who specializes in blood and bone marrow cancer, has been treating myeloma his entire career. He and UCSF hematologist-oncologist Thomas Martin , MD, created the UCSF Multiple Myeloma Program, the largest of its kind in the west.
