At the National Institute of Health

March 14, 2007 Link Amma's Grace

Dear Friends,
By Amma’s Grace we are all ok. We are here at NIH – the National Institute of Health, in Bethesda, Maryland, near Washington DC. We’ve been here since Monday afternoon. The lady who first signed us in, Pamela is a real angel. She comes everyday to pray with us, soul-stirring, powerful prayers… She really does the work of GOD. Everybody here is extremely helpful, and tries their best to do what will help…

Unfortunately, I had almost finished this post, when the net connection went down, and so I lost everything… This is going to be a little shorter. Just goes to show the value of saving your work (I suppose everybody has learned this the hard way some time or other – the only difference is that I’ve just learned it again, something I seem to have a penchant for…)

We got here on Monday afternoon, the 12th of March, 2007. The rest of the afternoon was a flurry of activity, visits by Doctors, Nurses, Nurse Practitioners, Fellows in research, friends, etc. The first person to visit intercepted us as Pamela showed us our room, Dr Liz of Neurology. She was the first of many to hear firsthand our long and involved case history. The reason Neurology was coming by was due to some abnormality in the brain scan that they had noticed… Dr Sudarshan dropped by, along with a whole team of doctors from all different departments. The Neurosurgery people came by and said that looking over her brain scan, it seemed that there was a slight swelling adjacent to the 4th ventricle, which is restricting the flow of the Cerebro Spinal Fluid. This is currently the culprit of her frequent massive headaches, nasuea, vomiting, and dizzyness… Anyhow, they said that as she didn’t have any serious symptoms (no numbness, no slurred speech, no vision problems, no etc.) there was no need to put a shunt to drain it otherwise… Many, Many other people came by, I’ve lost track. The visiting hours are officially 9am to 9pm; Uncle Jeff and I stayed until about 11:15pm. Through Martha’s agency, Mom had permission to stay with Annika, and we have a private room…

On Tuesday, the 13th was another tizzy of a day. Infectious Disease came in (that is to say, a bunch of doctors from that department came in) and Dr Sudarshan dropped by twice. Pamela’s wonderful prayer-circle… Also a guy from the Pain team (no not torture – they try to remove the pain) came, he went over Annika’s case history once again, and suggested a bunch of different pills, of which Annika is taking ONE. She doesn’t like taking pills… The doctors were all wondering, since the brain thing was not typical of anything. They had actually never seen anything like this before – it was not easily identifiable as one disease or another. This led the doctors to think that it could be indicative that the tumor and metastasis was actually something else, perhaps an infection of some sort. So they wanted to do a “Lumbar Puncture,” where they get some sample of the Cerebro-Spinal fluid for testing.

Today, Wednesday, the 14th, we had more doctor’s visits, and more confusion. Dr Sudarshan came by multiple times, and said that Dr Chang, the guy who would do the biopsy, was worried about the effects of the Meftal-Forte, which Annika had been taking as a (very effective with minimal immediate side effects) pain killer. It seems that it has a side effect of thinning the blood and increasing the clotting potential at the same time… I don’t know how… So the biopsy was moved to Thursday, tomorrow. In it’s place, today she had a CT of her brain and a bone scan. For the bone scan she had to be injected with more Gamma-ray tagged sugars… the scan took about 1 hour. The lady who was doing it was nice and allowed us to be there in the room – there really is no reason why we should not be allowed there… The brain CT was just a quickie, to see if the swelling was any different today than one week ago… Since it wasn’t, they decided that the Lumbar Puncture (LP) could be done tomorrow also, at the same time as the kidney biopsy. The biopsy is planned to be a core sample – a big needle to get a bit of tissue.

Aunty Raji and Uncle Vaidya from our Satsang group in Connecticut drove all the way down to see us on Tuesday. They will go tomorrow morning.

Timothy and family, old family friends, drove down from Massachusetts on their way to the south part of North Carolina. They arrived on Sunday, with our former dog, Rosa.

We just found out, one of the nurses here is a Buddhist nun. She works here at NIH as a Nurse, and is on our floor… Amma is surrounding us with Her Grace and Her People…

Apparently, many doctors from other hospitals have also been consulted by our team, including several that we had previously contacted. The general consensus is that nobody has seen anything quite like this before, it may not even be cancer… The Biopsy, with Amma’s Grace, will tell….
Aum Amriteshwaryai Namah
-Link