Have you ever gotten some news that seemed to ease everything? You’d just spent four days on the edge of your seat, waiting and waiting, afraid of getting a phone call. Then you do get it, but rather than falling to the floor, you suddenly feel so much better?
Phew. I don’t have Leukemia.
I’d breathe a sigh of relief if Fate hadn’t decide to throw a really horrible cold into the mix. Thanks for the one-two punch, Fate; sure, I don’t have leukemia, but it’s still something else, and now I can’t breathe. Life’s grand, ain’t it?
Hope whatever it is ain’t too serious, look after yourself kid. Love the blog, keep us posted.
You should ahve just asked me and I would have put your mind at ease. As you are squarely between the ages of 10 and 40 there was practically no chance that you have Leukemia. What’s more, with a statistical analysis I can also assure you that you also do not have prostate cancer, Ebola, tennis elbow, Syphilis, or scurvy.
I for one am glad you don’t have leukemia, and I have to disagree with Steve, as there are leukemias that strike all ages. It’s just that certain ones tend to strike the very young or the very old. There’s a middle aged one too. And they can all have instances outside their usual age ranges.
Unfortunally, not everyone is so lucky, but I am glad are healthy.
Will keep you in my prayers…
Tim,
As I believe you are a doctor while I’ve only only played one with Kiersten Thomas, the girl next door, I should probably defer to you on the point, but as I did once successfully stick a bandaid on someone’s knee and as I am arrogant as all getout, I feel qualified to continue.
Sure there are different types of Leukemia which have varying incidence rates among various demographics, but still if you take 100,000 20-somethings and lock them in a room for a year only 1 or 2 will be stricken with Luekemia and that will be the least of their worries since they likely would have run out of food and water months before this point. Why do you always foregt to leave food and water when you lock people in rooms; it is like when you were a child and you caught all those turtles and kept forgetting to punch air holes in the box. Well anyway if *I* locked 100,000 20-somethings in a room – not that I would ever do this since clearly it would be in violation of all sorts of fire code regulations – only 2 percent of 1 percent of them would get luekemia. The percentage would be even lower if all 100,000 were caucasian and female like Heather (on a sidenote if anyone is wondering what to get me for my birthday, a room with 100,000 20-something women is not a bad gift idea – though I grant you it’d be tough to wrap).
Sure that means some still do get sick, but in the case of Heather she has received a countless list of rare disease diagnoses and the number of these and their rarity has made me wonder if perhaps her doctors are just malicious or maybe that they don’t know what the heck they are doing and are just feeding her symptoms into a random health website and diagnosing it as whatever the website finds. I mean at this point I fully expect that during the next year, they will tell her that she has sickle-cell anemia, bubonic plague, and bird-flu.
-Steve
Most of the time, you get a nice classical presentation of an illness in a patient who fits the classical mold for that disease. That’s when a monkey could make the diagnosis. Then you get a case that just doesn’t fit, so you start looking for Zebras (weird rare diseases) or horses (common diseases) that are dressed up like Zebras. So, yep, they’re stumped, so they’re trying to test for everything they can thing of that has a history of weird presentations. I surprised they haven’t brought up Syphilis yet.