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In our last episode of Health Update, my M-protein level was starting to rise, indicating that the Revlimid was losing effectiveness and the multiple myeloma was staging a comeback. This is normal and expected after two years. When it got above 1.0, it would be time to switch to a second-line treatment. In the end, I got nearly three years out of the Revlimid, but the time has now come to move on:

The new treatment will consist of an oral version of my old friend Velcade teamed up with Darzalex, a monoclonal antibody that’s one of the slew of new treatments that have been approved over the past few years. I will also once again be taking the evil dex, a sleep killer marketed as a corticosteroid. During my last round of dex, I used my treatment nights to write a 40-page tutorial on special and general relativity. I can’t really say why I did that, but I’m sure it would have been a publishing sensation if I had ever published it.

Anyway, the new treatment will start in a week or so. It’s once a week for two months, then once every two weeks for two months, and then once a month. The total length of time depends on how I respond. Once the M-proteins are back under control, I’ll begin a maintenance routine which will hopefully last a couple of years. Keep your fingers crossed.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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