Journal entry by mark loehlein —
Super Bowl win was a great way to start the decade! But by 2013 I was again feeling pain in my right shoulder. No worries- remember, they told me the cancer would never return to the same spot. Well.... to me it was a "shoulder". To the doctors, it was the difference between it previously being in my scapula (shoulder blade), and this time my collarbone (clavicle). That was a dirty trick. If you remember when they showed Charles Woodson (after breaking his collarbone in the Super Bowl) trying to lift his arm to cheer in the second half, and wincing in pain, that was how I felt.
On a side note... it DID return to my clavicle later in the decade- further making my case unlike any they had ever seen before. Even today when seeing doctors who don't see me regularly (most don't know my pre-Mayo history), they often comment on my extensive background with Multiple Myeloma and I think... you don't know half the story.
Anyways- that was the 5th occurrence, and the next 4 were covered in the beginning days of my caring bridge journal. In the meantime I became a regular discussion on Mayo's Tumor Board. It was around that time they decided I couldn't get any more radiation in the same area of the right shoulder, and the cryoablation was done instead. After that the radiation oncologist told me the bone was thin as two soda crackers and about as strong. I had always referred to my left shoulder as 'the bad one', but now- they both really were. So I'll end the journal's pre-history at this point, and let it pick up at it's beginning, which was 2017.
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