After receiving the diagnosis of Castlemans (see early blog post) we all ran to our computers to look it up. By now you may have already done the same thing and relaized that you can pretty much learn all they know about Castlemans disease in about 5 minutes. It's rare, uncureable, and it's anyones guess how you get to treat it.
The biopsy tissue was sent off to the Mayo clinic in Rochester, MN for a more thorough review and second opinion. This process is tantamount to starting over as one hospital has to package and send the tissue to another hospital. I think they may have used one of the modern parcel services, but the two weeks that it took to get the second opinion still has me baffled. If you have read my opening blurb, you can pretty much surmise that the second opinion showed that my dad had Hodgkins disease. We didn't know whether to be skeptical or excited that this was the new diagnosis. Most of us knew that Hodgkins was a much less mysterious and treatable condition, but now we had to go back and study all over again.
He is undergoing rehabilitation to recover from the stroke mentioned earlier also. Initially he had some speech trouble, but most of his remaining struggle seems to be limited to keeping steady on his feet and staying awake. I think this covers most of the "How we got here" info, so I'll try to keep it to the present.
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