Painful Coughs and Sneezes Lead to Life-Changing Diagnosis

Standing in his kitchen one summer day in 2015, Alan Stephenson sneezed. That simple reflex triggered such intense pain throughout his body that Alan fell to the floor.

“I hurt my back and I was pretty sure I had fractured a rib,” he recalled. Other pains and injuries continued for months, but Alan — a financial advisor who also owns several home repair and service businesses with his sons and serves as chief patient advisor for Polygon Health — put off seeing a doctor, thinking he was simply getting older. Later, he started to develop recurrent fevers and coughs. In the shower one day in March 2016, the steam triggered a painful coughing fit.

The next day, Alan went to the doctor and learned that the coughing episode caused one of his vertebrae to collapse and, more significantly, that he had multiple myeloma — an incurable but treatable blood cancer that develops in plasma cells within the bone marrow.

“I really can’t explain all the ways this has impacted my life,” Alan said. “I am in pain every day, I fight fatigue constantly, and the stress this has put on my wife has broken me more than once. The financial burden has been extreme, but I am fortunate that I can bear it better than most people.”

Alan, who lives with his family in West Monroe, Louisiana, started his treatment at the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute, part of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock.

Like most blood cancer patients, his treatment has involved multiple chemotherapy medications, immunotherapy, and other drugs, with his doctors making changes as his body — and the cancer — reacted to the various therapeutic approaches.

His treatment began with an intensive chemotherapy regimen known as VDT-PACE (an acronym for a combination of agents) and was followed by tandem stem cell transplant — a two-stage medical procedure involving courses of high-dose chemotherapy and the infusion of blood-forming stem cells. He later went through 16 rounds of daratumumab, a monoclonal antibody, with weekly injections of bortezomib, a proteasome inhibitor, and dexamethasone, a corticosteroid. At that point, Alan was told he was in remission, and he started a planned three years of maintenance with a variety of other medications.

Alan was off all treatments from May 2020 until January 2024, when he had to start another chemotherapy regimen because of a relapse. Back in remission, he is now taking intravenous immunoglobulin to help fight infections and respiratory problems.

A committed patient advocate, Alan has witnessed the emergence of new cancer-fighting drugs on his own health journey. “We can’t do this without research, and research doesn’t happen without funding,” he said.

Alan wants lawmakers and policy makers to understand the value of sustained funding for scientific research. “When you get the ‘yes, it’s cancer’ call, you will be thankful for the research that has taken place in the past and is currently being pursued,” he said.