Mary's Pad

We’ve been spending a lot of time talking to doctors and in and out of hospitals because of various GI and ortho issues. It’s all a long story, not one that I necessarily want to rehash here, but so far things are good.

Turns out Mary has a really rare condition that is the underlying cause for her GI issues. To quote her GI doc, “in medicine we have some common conditions that we see and can usually easily diagnose, and then we have the ones that puzzle us and that aren’t as easy to diagnose. They are rare, and you are probably the only patient I will ever see with this condition, and we call such conditions the zebras. You have a zebra.”

This week she went in for shoulder surgery, to repair a Bankart tear, a pretty standard one-day procedure that turned into a painful 3 day ordeal, not because of the surgery but because of a botched up nerve block and pain management issues. Anyway, after she came out of the OR, when the surgeon came in to see her, I asked: “so was it pretty much what you expected when you got in there?” She turned to Mary and replied – “well, not really. I mean, it was definitely a classic Bankart tear, but you have an interesting labrum. It’s not the typical labrum, I’ve never seen anything like it.” When we questioned her further she said: “It’s not really anything to worry about, it’s just like how we all have different hair colors, there are some that are more common, some people have black hair, some are blond, some are redheads, pretty common colors. You have purple hair.”

Hmmm… I’ve always thought she was a tad weird, and now I have the professional opinion of two different doctors to back me up…