At age 89, Cal Crow plays water volleyball three days a week, then chases that with a 1,000-foot swim; on his off days, he logs at least a mile around his neighborhood — and that’s with a cancer diagnosis.
In 2019, Crow was having trouble hearing and went to see a physician who misdiagnosed him. He sought a second opinion at Fred Hutch Cancer Center, where a full body scan revealed that Crow had multiple myeloma.
“I didn’t know what that was,” said Crow. “All I knew was that I had an acquaintance who died of that. When I found out I had the same thing, I took notice.”
Multiple myeloma is cancer of the bone marrow; the “multiple” part refers to cancer cells that appear in various areas of the body as cancerous plasma cells overtake healthy blood cells.
A common treatment is a bone marrow transplant, but Crow was not eligible due to his age. So he embarked on a year of chemotherapy, which he found difficult to tolerate. He was hospitalized multiple times and developed eye infections and sores on his body. His Fred Hutch hematologist-oncologist Edward Libby, MD, now retired, recommended he pause his treatments because of these side effects.
“I was happy to stop treatment because being in the hospital thr
