November 5, 2006: May you live in interesting times…

I was leaving Acupuncture Family Practice in Sudbury MA (978-443-6789) this morning, and who should I see walking in but my sister Stacey, and what should I see atop her head but… hair!  Unadorned!  It’s very very short hair, granted, but long enough to wear out and about in the world.  I did the Ancient and Hallowed Hair Celebration Dance of the WASP People (you can probably learn this for yourself at a WASP festival, a yearly event where our people gather for coffee hours, brisk walks, and a traditional book-swapping game called “Oh, you must read this!”)

But should anyone feel a lack of interesting medical news, here’s the latest:

Stacey had her appointment with TFDB to check out the anomalies from the very good PET/CT scans. There were actually three areas that “lit up” indicating areas of possible concern: the breast, a small spot on her back, and her thyroid.  TFDB said that she didn’t see anything suspicious on the breast, so she said that she wanted to repeat the PET scan in a month.  She’s not sure what’s going on with the area on her back, so she’s setting up an appointment with a dermatologist to check that out.  And an ultrasound to check out the thyroid.  And a mammogram as a follow-up to the surgery.  Oy vey!

In other news, a recent echocardiogram showed that Stacey’s heart function is down to 45%.  I realize now that I should have been reporting this all along because that number sounds pretty shocking, but it wouldn’t sound so very bad had I told you last month that it was at 55%, and 65% the month before that, et cet.  This is something that happens when you pump your body full of really nasty chemicals, and one of the ways that chemo takes its toll.  45% happens to be the magic number, so TFDB has put off the next Herceptin treatment until the next echo to see what happens.  She thinks that this is the result of tripling up the Herceptin to try to give Stacey a more human schedule, so it may be that doubling it is the best way to go about it.  (By the by, when I saw her this morning, not only did the hair look great, she did as well.  She certainly did not look like a person with reduced heart function.  She did not join in the Ancient and Hallowed Hair Celebration Dance with quite as much aplomb as I might have expected, but that might have been because people were already staring at us.  Oh, all right, they were staring at me.

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