Update on Ed

The consultation with Dr. Underhill was relaxed, informative and funny!  He is the surgeon that will do the biopsy on the lymph nodes – the mediastinoscopy.  We spent an hour and a half listening to him telling us all about the body and comparing it to PacMan in how it operates in certain instances.  He made everything so easy to understand and even loaded the CT scans we took and sat for a long time explaining everything we were seeing on this giant video screen.  Occasionally he would stop and say “hhmmmm, that’s strange” or “that’s interesting” or “gee, that shouldn’t be there.”  

He did show us some blockage in Ed’s arteries and wants him to have a stress test before he does the biopsy, just to make sure he is able to handle the procedure and being under anesthesia.  His feeling is this is an autoimmune disease of which there are about 80 different types but he did mention sarcoidosis.

Love the internet – looked it up and here is a description of sarcoidosis:
Sarcoidosis (sahr-koi-DO-sis) is characterized by the development and growth of tiny clumps of inflammatory cells in different areas of your body – most commonly the lungs, lymph nodes, eyes and skin. Doctors believe sarcoidosis results from an abnormal immune response – most likely to something inhaled from the air – but just what triggers this response isn’t known. The course of sarcoidosis is variable from person to person. Often, it goes away on its own, but in some people signs and symptoms may last a lifetime.

Until the biopsy, we won’t know what we are dealing with but we are making progress in getting to the end result.