(intro theme music) (uplifting music) - Welcome to TV Film, I'm Jermaine Wells.

TV Film showcases the talents of upstate New York media makers across all genres.

And today, filmmaker Dorothy Marquet shares her mother's story of living with multiple myeloma, a rare blood cancer.

And since 2016, Dorothy has watched as her mother fractured bones, endured an arduous stem cell transplant, and experienced alterations to her treatment plan every time the current one fails.

Dorothy's film, "Myeloma on the Low Plains" is the result of her need to document her mother's life, thoughts and art while she still has the chance.

- My film is about the story of my mother's life.

She has a rare blood cancer, multiple myeloma, and it's treatable, but it's not curable.

So it's kind of about her experience with that.

And kind of woven throughout it is themes of my relationship with her, the importance of mother-daughter, and I think how that kind of changed our relationship when she was diagnosed.

Starting out with this, I didn't know a ton about filmmaking or how to put together a story in this way using video.

It started as photos, but I filmed a few video clips and I was like, "Oh, this would be much better told in a film format."

I mean, the whole process through this, she's been extremely open and always willing to talk about it, which I've been continually, like, I respect that so much because I think that has to be hard.

But I think, 'cause our relationship is so close, there's already that trust, and just filming, it felt really natural.

With every draft I had, or throughout the process, I'd show her and we'd kind of discuss or have a talk about it even.

A few times I just kind of sat down and interviewed myself, I came up with a few questions, and that even led to including my dad's perspective on it because I don't want it to feel like a film where it's just her in it because in that process, you have so many people who need to support you to get you through it.

When it came to the film, oddly, and I was surprised by this throughout the whole process, it wasn't quite as emotional as I thought it would be, I think, because I was just on a mission to make it.

And it was like, "Well, I have to do this, and I have to make it and talk about it."

So yeah, the more emotional hard part dealing with it, I think, was so separate from the film because I wasn't worried about telling that.

We all had this common goal to make this thing and then see how it turned out.

(birds chirping) - I was told I didn't have a backbone, before I was told I wear my heart on my sleeve.

And the irony for me now is my backbone is collapsed, and it'll get worse.

I was diagnosed in January of 2016, and it's now the end of July of 2021.

Given the prognosis of five to seven years, it's been six years and I'm still doing pretty well, and I'm very grateful to be this age.

I love getting older.

I know I look a lot older than I am, but that's okay.

- [Dorothy] I had just turned 16 years old when my mom was diagnosed with multiple myeloma.

I was a sophomore in high school and it was winter break.

And I remember going to Hersheypark the day after I found out with my friend, Brooke and her mom.

And the whole time, I was extremely worried about what this thing was.

And I'd never heard of it before, but I knew it was something that would change our lives in a big way.

Somehow I remember the clothes I was wearing.

I remember small details from that day because, in hindsight, it was such a big, important moment.

I was wearing these gray leggings and a green coat.

And I remember getting on the rides at Hersheypark and I was trying to have fun, but I was too worried to really be in the moment.

- I seem to have funny kind of feelings of something going wrong in my body.

I remember at one point, I had a recurring dream.

In my dream, I would sit up in bed, and my teeth were crumbling and falling out.

And this dream happened often.

And when I turned 50, it was like, suddenly, I was not healthy, really not healthy.

Like, my face changed, it started to droop.

I remember, in one day my stomach was popping out, and it was strange, I don't know where that came from.

I had pneumonia for an entire summer, and I kept getting sick and I was trying harder and harder to eat better, and nothing was working.

Then, I was jogging.

I was 55, jogging along, not very fast, but I fractured a vertebra in my back.

I thought I pulled a muscle and I wasn't worried about it, and by the time it was checked, it had healed.

And then, I was riding bikes with my daughter and I felt something in my lumbar part of my spine, and I fractured another.

Then, they started to collapse a lot.

I lost five inches of height, which left little room for my internal organs.

My stomach was in my chest.

I went to many doctors, there were five altogether.

And I wasn't shocked because of my past and losing so many people, I was so aware that things could happen.

(sentimental music) My dad died when I was three months old.

My mom died when I was five, and she had cancer, my dad had heart disease.

After my mom died, I was separated from my three older brothers.

They stayed in the house that we had lived in and I went to live with my grandmother, I think she was 58 at the time.

And she had raised 10 kids, and then I came along.

But I loved my grandmother dearly, and I was terrified that she would leave me like my parents did.

I went to parochial school, and they had taught that the dead could see you and watch you.

And the thought, I guess, terrified me.

I was afraid of sinning and being disappointing somehow.

I guess the hardest part of growing up, besides losing my parents then, was I lost a brother, Nick, to a car accident.

There were guys who were drinking and drugging, and they decided they were gonna run a stop sign.

I remember an aunt came to tell me that this had happened, and I was shaking so bad, I couldn't hold the cup of tea that she offered me.

And it wasn't long, I started to experience panic attacks.

A teacher would call on me in the classroom to read and I would panic.

Going to art school was my way of expressing what I couldn't say in words, I was terrified of words.

I thought I'd let the art speak for me.

And I had a wonderful art teacher who encouraged me to go to art school, and I loved all of it.

- [Dorothy] The biggest way she's influenced me is through my art, and she's kind of done it on and off her whole life.

That's, I think, the major thing that influenced me to get into art when I was in middle and high school, and it led me to doing photography in college.

So it changed the course of my career because I've seen her glimpse into how she views art and how much she values it.

My mom is just the greatest person I'll ever know.

And I wish that other people could see her the way I see her because it's rare, she's so rare kind of person.

- How's that for a fairytale?

- I think starting in middle school was when I really noticed it where she's just my best friend, she always has been.

There's not a thing that I don't tell her, and I've often thought of her as like my human diary.

I think if we didn't talk so well and talk about everything, I think I'd write more stuff down, but I feel like I don't have the need to, because that's how I process and view the world.

I think a big thing I wonder is if she'll be there when I have kids.

So I think, there's always that slim chance that she will be there but there's a large chance that she's not, and I think I've had to mentally prepare myself for either way.

It's like one of those things I didn't know when I was younger but I've learned as I've gotten older about the things that have happened in her life and how hard it's been, and yet she's still been such a good parent is one of the coolest, most respectable things about her.

And I see how she's raised me, the ins and outs of it, and that's something that I wanna apply to my own kids.

It makes you question, why does her life end with this?

That's a really hard thing for me to process.

(sentimental music continues) - [Shirley] I had my autologus stem cell transplant at Johns Hopkins Oncology Center, it's in Baltimore, Maryland.

So I stayed there five weeks, and it was at housing that was specifically for people undergoing treatments.

One of the first things I had to do was inject myself with Neupogen, which is a drug that went in my stomach, I did it myself.

That drug mobilized stem cells from my bone marrow into my blood so that they could eventually pull out the stem cells that they needed to transplant back in me.

One of my most memorable days was when I lost my hair, seemed to all happen at once in the shower.

Clumps of hair were falling out, and I felt the clump going down the entire length of my body to my feet.

And that probably was one of the most traumatizing.

I didn't mind being bald.

I don't know, something about losing it.

(pensive music) I continued on chemotherapy.

I'll always be on treatment because I didn't reach complete remission with the stem cell transplant.

I got close, but it's being controlled with the medicines.

And in the course of all of that time in the infusion room, I got to know many wonderful people, but the trouble is, you lose them, they died of their cancers.

There was a judge who was just wonderful.

He was younger than me, had the same cancer, and he died.

And I sometimes search for people's obituaries, 'cause, that's hard, you make friends like that.

You have something in common, and you can talk about how you feel and they understand.

- Well, it's like with all the farming and raking and stuff.

- They ain't near done.

- I know, I'm just messing with them.

Let's see.

Tomorrow, the 11th, I have another radiation treatment, 11:50.

And then I have my cancer chemo.

- Tuesday you have radiation and chemo.

- Yeah, both of them.

I probably look haggardy.

- [Dorothy] No.

- Here, let me just get this.

- I don't know how many to make.

- I don't think you can make too many mashed potatoes.

- It was around the end of 2015 when my wife, Shirley, was diagnosed with multiple myeloma.

And it was a type of cancer that we really didn't know much about that, probably heard of it before.

Now you gotta completely reevaluate things a little bit.

I mean, we had went on some trips before, travel got to be sort of out of the picture because you can't just hop on a plane and go somewhere and travel when you have this condition.

Yeah, as for my daughter's future, that's a concern because naturally, she doesn't know what's gonna happen either, and she's gotta live through it.

You know, most kids expect their parents to be there for a long time, so I think it makes Shirley and Dorothy closer because they try to spend as much time together as they can.

It's of those things that you never completely get over it, but you constantly battle it and try to keep the upper hand.

Look at you, you're shedding.

You're shedding The farm, actually, it was in my family.

My dad bought it back around 1964, I think it was.

We did a lot of work to it over the years.

- And I like gardening.

I couldn't be in the ground for a year or two with my hands because of the bacteria, because of my immune system.

But I'm back at it, and I'm growing tomatoes and peppers, and my husband, too, he's doing much of it.

So that's been a happy part.

I was bulimic make for a while, that represented filling up, like something I needed, and purging of something that I wanted rid of.

I knew trying to be healthy that that was very, very wrong, and I kept trying.

And I remember reading that if you get through a year without purging, that you're probably cured.

Well, I'd almost made it a year several times, and then finally I stopped.

And I think that helped when I found a religious group that I ended up joining.

It's an unpopular group, it's Jehovah's Witnesses.

I was with them for 13 years.

And the reason that I was so receptive to it was I needed answers.

What happens to people when they die?

Are they watching you?

Was that, all of my childhood, all of that wrong?

Could they have been in purgatory?

Is there such a thing?

And they answered all those questions, not once, but with two scriptures and always with logical answers.

I left them, not because of the people, it was the teaching, and I couldn't do it anymore.

I don't know how in the world you could keep this up.

And I do have to blame the myeloma 'cause it was on the hip, and then the radiation got rid of that and then maybe caused this.

It's just one thing leads to another.

I don't know, five years is a long time to be doing this stuff, going from one thing to the next.

This is the worst.

Even a broken backbone wasn't this bad, it wasn't so constant.

People talk about pain, there's pain, and there's pain, and there's really pain.

It's like a burden to have a leg.

Feels like, could just give way.

This is better, I think.

Now, a dear aunt of mine, aunt Martha, she has multiple myeloma as well.

And I'd always wondered, before that happened to her, what could I have possibly done to cause this, or what could have caused this?

I never smoked.

And one of the chemicals that causes multiple myeloma is benzene, that's in cigarettes, that's in petroleum products.

- But then you think, you just gotta take it a day at a time.

What can you do?

- That's the best.

The lymph.

Well, we have got a lot of the same stuff, don't we?

- Yeah, isn't that amazing?

Now, what's this Shirley?

Mom's is low too?

- Red blood cell count.

- Oh, okay.

- [Shirley] Yeah.

See we both have the kidney kind of low.

- Probably 'cause we're related, maybe that's why.

- That is weird, isn't that?

If it was just us and we didn't have you, well, we'd be lost.

- It's not that I want you to have it.

- [Aunt Martha] Yeah, I know what you mean.

- [Shirley] And the thing that Aunt Martha and I had in common was living at the same house where my grandmother raised me and we drank from the same well.

And I heard years after I was done living there that there had been a blacksmith shop on the site where our house was, where the well was, actually.

And I don't know if it's true, I'm still researching it.

So that might be an answer to that big question of why or how.

- Hmm, that's scary.

Makes you wonder, why us?

- [Shirley] Where stuff comes from?

The thought of leaving my family without me is unbearable, and the thought of not seeing my daughter's future and the future I wanted for myself is numbing.

But I try to be positive but I think the emotional part is taken over often.

I'm mostly grateful because of my daughter, she's 21 now.

She's doing artwork as well, she's very creative.

And I feel very proud and happy that maybe I helped her with that.

- Learn more about the films and filmmakers in this season of TV Film at wmht.org/tvfilm.

And be sure to connect with WMHT on social media.

I'm Jermaine Wells.

(outro theme) - [Announcer] TV Film is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York state legislature.