Yup we are finding out that each thing is in some unexpected way connected to the others, at least to an extent. We just found out Wednesday that the Secondary parathyroid disease has an unwanted impact on her kidneys, but At least THAT is beginning to come under control. Her PTH level was at 775 just 2 months ago and with nothing more than Vitamin D it has come down to the 200 + range. But she still needs to have the offending parathyroid gland removed.

I am amused by the television commercials by the Sonosite company. They make ultrasound machines and advertise to the public all the miraculous imaging that can be done with them, very reminiscent of the Star Trek Tricorder. Of course, its not quite that easy, but I don't think it will take 200 more years to come up with a better scanner than Bones McCoy had.

Algorithms for diagnosis are immensely helpful, unless the patient is one of the 5%. I hope we never get to the point where we say, "well we are 95% sure you don't have cancer. Goodbye."

It's nice having a Dr here, NOT for any medical advise, but someone that can relate to what we are going through without think she is Mental. In the beginning we had an ER nurse tell us that they had exhausted all the PHYSICAL avenues and would need to delve into the mental. This is when she was having upper chest area pains. Two weeks later she HAD to have her gall bladder removed because it was about to burst. Was full of several 1 inch stones and numerous other smaller ones.

Evening yard.

That is why treating some conditions sounds so simple, but turns out to be challenging. You make something better, then something else gets worse and what you thought was primary turns out to be secondary and you have to trace back until you find the real offender. And it might still be more than one thing.

Many people just want their symptoms to go away, but physicians want to make the root cause go away, and that can take time. Ends up being a balancing act of symptomatic and pathophysiologic approaches.

Howdy, JJ!

I am on a drive to 200 tonight.

You sound like Patty's Endocrinologist. He is the only one that didn't blow her off as being at least partly mental. He always said there is SOMETHING wrong, that there were to many intersecting incidents but he couldn't figure out what it was. Her parathyroid disease was actually found out by accident. We were just getting ready to leave the Dr. office, he had actually left the room and came back and said, hey, why you're why don't we do a simple blood test for ... (don't remember actually what he said it was for). Anyway he called back within an hour and said she needed to see her Endocrinologist ASAP cause her levels were off the scale!

Don't do anything you'd regret Skunk. At least wait until you see the specs on the FDM.

You're gonna make it Doc, and More!

HELLO JJ!

New Mexico is good Skunk how is your neck of the woods?

That sounds like what happened to my mother. She was told repeatedly in the ED it was heartburn, but a gallbladder scan, which is neither expensive, difficult, nor hazardous proved otherwise. She didn't want to hear she had a lot of gall, but she certainly was pleased to be rid of her colicy pain episodes!