Jenny cried when she saw our family's picture in the Wall Street Journal today

This morning I was on my weekly team call and I looked up as my wife Jenny walked into the room crying uncontrollably.  As I jumped up to comfort her, many things ran through my mind-- Did her cancer come back, did somebody die? These were my first two thoughts. I was puzzled as she handed me the front page of the Wall Street Journal, D1 Personal Journal section that had a highly-posed large color picture of our entire family making a snowman. http://www.wsj.com/articles/new-weapons-in-the-fight-against-multiple-myeloma-1451938258 Other than goofy look on our son Clark's face, I thought it was a good picture. (Me with the shovel makes it look like I am doing something.) It took me a few seconds to register that these were tears of joy because of a the WSJ's public acknowledgment of the years of hard work that Jenny had put in serving many thousands of other myeloma patients.  After I came out of "stupid guy mode" I enjoyed the moment with Jenny and we discussed the long journey our family has been on since she was diagnosed in July of 2010. It has now been 5 and 1/2 years since we received the shocking news that Jenny had a terminal cancer called multiple myeloma... google search after google search kept coming up with the same answer--  that there is no cure and 2-5 years to live. Well that was over five years ago and there have been huge advancements in the field of multiple myeloma research and medicine. Although there is still no cure for myeloma, few cancers in the last decade have made more progress.

I am especially proud of Jenny's contribution towards a cure for this disease. After Jenny's second bone marrow transplant, she treated this disease like an entrepreneurial startup. Mapping out what was being done, identifying and prioritizing dozens of the unsolved problems and then getting started with her MVP (minimal viable product)-- a weekly radio show interviewing the top myeloma researchers in the world. Jenny has turned her internet radio show following into the world's largest patient to patient online support community for Myeloma patients-- MyelomaCrowd.org. The most recent step in this journey has been assembling an advisory board of the top researchers in the world to create help search for potential cures for patients with "high-risk myeloma"-- Something that no other organization is working on.  Through a global call for proposals and and very creative crowd funding campaigns, Jenny is about to provide initial funding to two potentially curative therapies-- One out of University of Würzburg in Germany and the other out of Johns Hopkins in Baltimore Maryland.  http://www.myelomacrowd.org/mcri/ 

Once in a while Jenny will have a small pity party and  laugh and say, how in the world is a stay-at-home mom of six children going to have any impact? Then her survival instincts kick and she goes into entrepreneurial overdrive mapping out the next phase of her strategy to find a cure. Over the years I have interviewed many thousands of entrepreneurs and invested in more than 100 startup companies and Jenny's strong maternal instinct to survive and raise our children is stronger than any entrepreneurial drive I have ever witnessed. Between making dinner for the family, taking kids to music lessons and helping with homework she fits in time to connect cancer patients to new clinical trials, make doctor introductions, research who she will interview for her next radio show or a make a fundraising call to fund potentially curative research. 

I just got called to the dinner table... another extraordinarily normal wonderful dinner.  Tacos my favorite food,  my 11 year old making up a rap about how good mom's tacos were, my daughter making funny faces with orange slices.  During dinner tonight, I realized that the emotion this morning wasn't so much the public acknowledgement but more the emotional realization that this is really happening and she has a very high chance of reaching her goal of being a mom raising our children.  It has been an exhausting journey, but the family picture on the bottom center of WSJ page D1 today, summed up why it has been worth every effort.

P.S. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all of our friends.