After seeing her doctor and doing a bone density scan, they found her result to be -3.9 which is very severe. She took some steroid shots and went to Italy anyways. They had a great time and the tour was very accomodating with my mother's condition.
We just returned from our Hopkins checkup a couple of weeks ago and everything was pretty much clean. However, the CT scan showed a compression fracture of 80% in the T12 area of her spine. We consulted a spine surgeon (Dr. Hasz of the Virginia Spine Institute) and he mentioned that there was nothing he could really do for her but rather that we needed to treat her osteoporosis as her level is *very* concerning. He mentioned we would need a non-standard and very aggressive treatment plan.
So I spent some time trying to track down a specialist and it was fairly difficult. It seems that most osteoporosis specialists are endocrinologists. First I looked for private practices. These days there are a lot of Dr. review sites that you can look at to get a feel for the doctor. A lot of the private practitioners had terrible reviews so I avoided those. The good ones were very busy and couldn't take appointments till late December, early January. I tried Hopkins but realized their bone center is 20 minutes further than the hospital so that was too far. We finally settled on Dr. Barsony at Georgetown. I feel more comfortable with university doctors for these kinds of special situations so hopefully she will end up being a good choice. The appointment is scheduled for December 10.
My mother's 5 year anniversary from her Whipple is coming up on Nov. 28. They will be at Hopkins for a blood draw so we scheduled a little meeting with Dr. Cameron so my parents could say thank you. He's 77 now but still trucking along doing many many whipples a week. I think his record for number of Whipples will be unbeatable.
