The Blog of mamapolo

I hadn't realized quite how stressed I was about the PET scan - both for the obvious reason - so we know if the cancer has started to eat at my husband's body anywhere else besides the left lung and the brain - but also because I felt like it was my task. I felt like I had been given the assignment of regulating my husband's sugar so we could get this important test, and like a failure to do so would have been my fault.

I have been impressed with my husband's medical care for the most part - especially at those temples of medicine in Pittsburgh - Presbyterian and Shadyside Hospitals, Hillman Cancer Center. But the devil is in the details, and in this age of specialization, the lung doctor who wants the PET scan is not the doctor who monitors and prescribes for the diabetes issues. The endocrinologist, the diabetes doctor, seems unable to grasp the importance of the PET scan and addresses only the diabetes.

On our last visit on Wednesday past, she prescribed cortisol, because she said he has very weak adrenal glands. (He asked if he'd still be able to play the violin.) I asked what the cortisol would do, and she said it would raise his blood sugar levels and prevent the "lows" that had been plaguing him (but not recently).

I'm not a doctor, but I made the decision not to fill the prescription until after the PET scan today - because we'd come too far to risk escalating his sugar levels again. I have to go now and get it filled.

The whole medical scene these days reminds me of the - was it a Buddhist parable? - about the seven blind men who were taken to 'see' an elephant.

One felt the elephant's ear and said the elephant was like a basket; another felt the elephant's leg and said the elephant was like a tree. Nobody really saw the elephant, because they observed only parts of the whole. It is my fear that in modern medicine, nobody really sees the patient - just his pancreas, or his lung, or his brain.

I guess that's why God gave us loved ones.