Rob Toth seemed to be leading a pretty good life.    

Toth moved to Airdrie from north Calgary in 2009 with his wife Michelle and daughters Jessie and Reagan.  He'd been involved in the oil industry service sector for nearly 25 years.  He lived an active life, playing baseball and hockey while he grew up and still enjoyed playing golf.  His priorities had changed from being involved in some of those sports, to following his daughters around as they took part in them.  In June 2017 his youngest daughter was just getting ready for graduation.  Everything seemed to be going well in Rob's life, except for the nagging pain in his back.

He says, "Probably for about the past five or six years, my back had started to kind of bother me just a little bit and I went to a variety of medical people and they felt it was just age and arthritis and different things like that.  It all kind of came to a head on June 1st of 2017."

Toth was playing golf when excruciating pain during his swing brought him to his knees.  After having medical tests, Toth received a call from his family doctor telling him his kidneys were failing and he needed to get to emergency right away.  After about 36 hours of kidney biopsies and other types of tests, doctors found that Toth had an extreme amount of protein in his blood which he says, "packed off my kidneys" and they were failing.

That news left Toth reeling, but he still hadn't heard the full diagnosis.  That took additional time, and additional doctors to figure out.  He says it was like an episode of the television show "House."

"I was sitting in the bed and there was like five or six different doctors trying to figure out what was going on.   Me and my wife were just kinda there, eyes wide open, not really knowing what was wrong because, to be honest with you, I didn't feel completely, terribly on my death bed or anything like that but once they kind of figured it out there was kind of an "aha" moment of everything that had been leading up to it in the previous years I guess." 

Toth was told he had myeloma, a cancer that affects the plasma cells in bone marrow and a disease that, like so many people, he had never heard of.  He found out later that it was the disease that took his favourite teacher when he was growing up.  "I thought he had died of skin cancer (melanoma).  I had no idea what myeloma was," he says.  

When he first received the horrible news that he was suffering from an incurable cancer, Toth's thoughts turned to his family, his wife and daughters who were all there when doctors broke the news.  And while the cancer is considered incurable, Toth says it's not untreatable and he's responded well to his course of treatment which has included a chemotherapy protocol, dialysis to help his kidneys recover, as well as a stem cell transplant.  Some patients take 12 to 24 months to recover from the transplant but Toth was only off work for three and a half months and is now back full-time.  

Toth is still suffering some pain in his back and finds that he gets easily fatigued but feels, otherwise, he's doing very well.  Because of research into the disease, his prognosis is much better than it might have been a few years back.

"Somebody in my condition and the type of myeloma that I had, the prognosis wouldn't have been very good 15 years ago, we're talking months.  But the work that's been done in the field over the past 15 years, and the work that's being done and the drugs that are being developed, they tell me, you know, you hate to say this kind of stuff, but, initially, the average is about four years and people are living up to ten years, and there are people who have had this disease for 25 years and are still doing very well."

That research has spurred Toth on to become involved in the 3rd edition of the Greg Roberts Memorial Myeloma Walk / Run in Airdrie tomorrow.  Greg Roberts passed away in 2014 after being diagnosed with myeloma and his sister Pamela has worked hard to build awareness of the disease.  Toth says he's hoping he can help with Pamela's advocacy. 

According to Toth, myeloma seems to be affecting more people and he hopes that the walk will raise awareness to that fact.  Stats show that every day eight Canadians are diagnosed with the disease, yet few people know about it.  

Toth knows that, despite the early success of the treatment he's received, myeloma is a clever disease.  "The cancer seems to outsmart the treatments to the point where you just keep going to different treatments and then eventually your immune system becomes compromised because the treatments no longer work and that kind of leads to trouble."

The Airdrie walk and run begins tomorrow at 9:00 am at East Lake Regional Park.  You can find out more about myeloma or support the Airdrie event here.

Toth says he hopes tomorrow's event accomplishes several things, some of them intensely personal. 

"I want to make sure that Canadians have access to the most recent drugs and continue to drive for the cure through different trials and things.  I'm hoping that a cure comes from this because I have no plan on checking out anytime soon."

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