I had my appointment with surgeon on July 31. I think things went well. I have somehow lost 5 pounds, which is wonderful news.  The doctor and his student spent 2 hours with my husband and me.  They did a thorough history of me and I was very impressed with his knowledge of Cushing's.  He has had other Cushing's patients and knows how to treat it.  I am on a 1400 calorie diet for a couple of weeks to try and reduce the size of my liver.  He could see from my CT scan that my liver is enormous.  He said that when I lean forward, it pushes all of my organs to my back so the surgery from the back is NOT an option.  Therefore, he will have to do it from the front and we need to make my liver as small as possible.  He is also consulting with an endocrinologist to see if there is a medication I can take that would stop the cortisol production for a couple of weeks and hopefully help with liver size reduction also. 

The plan is to be on this diet and possibly medication for about a month.  Surgery will be within a month depending on if the medication is an option or not.  It will be sooner if meds not an option.  The surgery normally would take 1 hour. My surgery will take about 4 hours because they will have to move my liver out of the way to locate my adrenal gland to remove it.  This is a dangerous surgery but it is NOT an option to NOT do the surgery.  Without this surgery I will die.  He is just trying to buy some time to try and shrink the liver and make this as safe as possible.  I am nervous, but have faith in the surgeon so we shall see how this goes.

I wish people would take the time to really understand what I am going through.  I don't necessarily want sympathy. I just want them to understand.  I am getting so tired of hearing people say that they have been sick before and know what it is like.  This isn't the flu or a cold people.  I wouldn't go up to someone with cancer patient or someone with another disease and tell them I know how they feel because I don't.  Each illness you get and each person has different symptoms and results.  There are many really bad diseases out there that make people feel like absolute crap, even though they will try to hold it together and not let the whole world see how they truly feel.