Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Three Mrs. Finnegans and some updates


We have had three Mrs. Finnegans around for a few days! We enjoyed a lovely visit from Sunday morning through Wednesday morning with Tim and Nikki, and having three Mrs. Finnegans at our evening fellowship confused some of the children! Tim and Nik are off to Tucson today, apartment hunting tomorrow, and then Tim starts his new job on Monday.

I got good news in the form of my final pathology report on Monday: the diagnosis of sarcoidosis is confirmed, and no cancer was found. Now I need to figure out what we do about the sarcoidosis, but I am hopeful that not much will be required immediately, and that it may resolve on its own, as often happens.

I got not-so-good news from the endocrinologist on Tuesday: I saw her to get the results of a test I did for her last month. It wasn't want I wanted to hear, that everything is normal and I am done with medical stuff. Instead, I have high levels of some hormones (cortisol and cortisone and creatinin ). She feels we need to figure out what is causing these elevated levels. She mentioned four scenarios.
1. The least problematic is that this is some sort of natural response to stress in my body-- that can apparently happen sometimes. This would require no treatment, just rest and relaxation. I could handle that...
2. It could also be the adenoma on my adrenal gland secreting the hormones. If this is case, we would need to do surgery to remove the adenoma.
3. It could also be the sarcoidosis in my adrenal glands, causing them to produce too much. This would require treatment for the sarcoidosis, which I believe is large doses of steroids.
4. There also could be something going on in my pituitary gland that is causing my adrenals to over-produce. Not sure what we do if that is the problem, but don't really want to find out.

Bummer. I just feel tired and weary of the whole thing, and don't want to think about any of it any more, to be honest!

Dave reminded me yesterday, after our visit with the endocrinologist, that the Lord really wants me to know that He is sufficient for me in anything. I resisted the impulse to retort to him that I would rather just go to the Bahamas, or as my friend Valerie said, "Stop being so holy, and let's go get ice cream!"

But, Dave is right: Christ will be sufficient, even as I weaken in my abilities. May His strength be seen there.

1 comment:

Randy Greenwald said...

Yes, Christ is sufficient. But that doesn't preclude the ice cream, does it? :-)