At my appointment with Dr Friedman, I felt like a ‘typical’ patient….something I hadn’t felt in a long time!  We reviewed my past testings, symptoms, picture timeline and he told me that Cushing’s was a possibility. I was scheduled for a dynamic pituitary MRI the following day, and his belief was that if I had an abnormality on MRI then I probably had Cushings.  He sent me home with lab orders to complete, one of which is a specialized test that only he does in diagnosing Cushings.  Dr. Friedman believes Cushings is a disease of high cortisol at night, and so he focused on cortisol levels at night by way of midnight serums/salivas, along with a specialized urine collection which is collected from 10 p.m. to 8 a.m.  He also has his patients test 24 hr urines, but recognizes a cyclical Cushing’s patient will have periods of low, normal, and high cortisol throughout the day…if that is all collected together then a sampled it is very likely to average out into the normal range.

 The next day I went to Torrance MRI center and I was really anxious!  I’m a bit claustrophobic and I knew it was going to be tight corners!!  Thankfully there was a bit of pharmaceutical help to be had, and the techs are awesome.  I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly the scan went. 

Now that my medical business was finished in California…Tami and I were able to play!  We went to a taping of the Mike and Molly show, did a Warner Bros. studio tour, a ‘sites and bites’ tour of Santa Monica, and a day of touring LA by way of the hop-on-hop-off bus.  Actually, the day of the HOHO bus, I had to send Tami out to start without me…we went out to breakfast and I was really struggling.  Thankfully later in the day I was able to meet up with her at the Farmer’s Market and finish out the day together.