For more than a year, Diane Hunter, now 72, had been experiencing vague symptoms — pain in her spine and hips, nausea, exhaustion, thirst, and frequent urination. Her primary care physician had ruled out diabetes before finally chalking up her ailments to getting older.
But months of intense back pain eventually landed her in the emergency room, where a doctor suggested that Hunter might have multiple myeloma. Hunter’s first question was, “What is that?”
Multiple myeloma is a cancer that develops in bone marrow plasma cells, crowding out healthy blood cells and damaging the bones. It is one of the most common blood cancers — and the most diagnosed among African Americans. The mortality rate from multiple myeloma also is higher among African American patients than white people, with a number of studies showing that, in addition to disease biology, societal factors such as socioeconomic status and lack of access to health insurance or medical services delay timely diagnoses.
A belated diagnosis is what happened to Hunter, a Black woman in Montgomery, Alabama. She said her primary care doctor dismissed a recommendation from her endocrinologist to refer her to a hematologist after finding high protein counts in her blood. Then, she said, he also refused to order a bone marrow biopsy after the ER doctor suggested she might have multiple myeloma. Fed up, she said, she fo …