BETA - What is surgery? When is surgery used in myeloma?

What is surgery? When is surgery used in myeloma? Surgery is where a specialized doctor who performs surgeries or a surgeon will operate by doing an incision or cutting into a certain area of the body and usually doing some type of manipulation or fixing an area that has something wrong with it. Other cancers, surgery is much more common to remove tumors from certain areas. With multiple myeloma, because it is a cancer of a certain type of white blood cell, removing it from one area doesn't necessarily take care of the whole problem. So it's not used as commonly in multiple myeloma. The places where we do use it, and we often work with our orthopedic doctors, the doctors who specialize in bone, is if somebody has some type of complication in a bone related to the myeloma. So if there was a fracture of an area of their spine, a spine surgeon might put in some hardware to help reinforce or strengthen that area of the spine, especially if it's causing pain or if the bone is causing some issue with the spinal cord or a nerve that's causing problems. Other areas where we might work with our surgeons is if a patient has a fracture of a bone, like in their leg or their arm, or has one that there's a concern they might have a fracture, in which case they might put some type of nail or rod to help reinforce that area. And then usually we work as a team with them, radiation oncologists, to help target the area that's causing pain or fracture, and then we use medications or therapies that get all throughout the body to take care of that area that's causing problems as well as anywhere else that gets in the body as well. Would a solitary plasma cytoma be removed by surgery? So solitary plasma cytoma is an area of plasma cells or myeloma cells causing a tumor in one area. And people can get solitary plasma cytomas or this tumor formation of plasma cells in one location and nowhere else throughout the body. There are some rare cases where they might be removed by surgery, like if nobody really knew what it was at first, it didn't get biopsied and a surgeon just decided to remove it. But usually what happens is it will get biopsied first and when it shows that it's a plasma cytoma, we can radiate that one area with a higher dose of radiation therapy and potentially cure the patient of that plasma cytoma without having to take out the whole thing. Even if a surgeon does remove most of or all of a plasma cytoma, it's still recommended that the area be radiated around it because the plasma cytoma is made up of blood cells and we presume that it's not just in that location but maybe some of the location around it.