The Seavey Family Blog

Let me start by saying that I greatly appreciate how much our close friends and family love Mandy, and care about her well-being. We all feel very loved knowing that that others worry about her as much as we do.

Okay - current run down. 2 weeks ago she went in for an ACTH stim (ACTH stands for AdreanoCorticoTropic Hormone, this hormone is produced by the anterior pituitary gland, and is supposed to stimulate the adrenal cortex.) which came back normal. For the first week after that she seemed to be doing really well.

Monday I dropped in the animal hospital to get a weight on her, she was looking very thin to me - but I figured that since I tend to be a bit neurotic when it comes to these things it may not be anything at all.
When Mandy hopped up on the scale I saw that she was only 43.4 pounds (down about 5 pounds from her last weighing two weeks ago). Brian (Dr. Sullivan) poked his head in and saw the weight, and told me to have her stand up, as soon as she did he pulled out a syringe and say “I’m taking blood, now.” I told him that I didn’t have an appointment and that I would just make one - I didn’t come down to bother him, but he was already crouched down getting ready to draw the blood.

He sent the blood to a lab in Michigan for a cbc and chem 18 and the results came back yesterday. Everything looked fine, except that her calcium levels were low. I was asked to drop her off for the day today (Thursday) and when I got in, Brian told Maria to take Mandy and asked me to step into his office (nothing like giving me a heart attack first thing in the morning!).

He has called the lab in Michigan and asked that the run a couple more specific tests, one looking for pancreatic cancer, and the other looking for any problems with her parathyroid gland. While she is in the hospital with him today they will be x-raying and ultrasounding her, as well as doing another ACTH stim test.

Hopefully I’ll have more answers when I go and pick her up today…

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 15th, 2005 at 10:00 am and is filed under Mandy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.