1 post tagged “david”

First let me apologize. I always forget that not everyone knows us personally.
I thought I'd give a bit of an anatomy lesson, no I'm not going to talk about how this bone is connected to that. I just thought since I received so many pm's asking that it would be easier to answer the questions all at once on here.

David has a fairly rare condition that makes his bones brittle. He is not lacking calcium like in the elderly where they get osteoporosis. He is lacking collagen. Collagen is what gives all our tissues in our body elasticity. Without it all our connective tissues are impacted. Connective tissues can be anything from ligaments and tendons to bone, muscle, the sclera in our eyes, white part. David has blue sclera as opposed to white or yellowish like most people.

What the treatment does for David.

All of us have bones and our bones are renewing themselves regularly. That is a part of our normal structure. When we are injured new bone appears in the form of callus type calcifications over the injury. This is the same for David. Understand, David's bones are much thinner than ours are. If you take, for example, one of our bones....the tibia or any of the long bones, they all sort of look the same. The are on x-ray thick bone covering a center channel of bone marrow. David's bones are not the same. His are a shell of bone covering a much larger channel of marrow. So then the difference between his and ours, above and beyond the obvious difference of brittle-ness, is that his bones don't have as much material holding them together which adds to the fragility.

So, Pamidronate, and many other bisphosphonate drugs, sort of prevent the absorption of the bone we have that is being made new. As I stated above all of us are making new bone all the time. The old bone is absorbed back into our system. We are slowing the process of absorption in David's bones, essentially, and allowing his bone to build greater mass. In other words, instead of thin, brittle bones he has thicker, brittle bones now.

Of course there are down sides to every drug and one of them with the type we use on him is an initial tiredness. Also, the potential for calcium loss. David has to take added calcium and then we have to watch for things like kidney stones.
The benefits are obvious. David hasn't had a major fracture since we started 2 1/2 yeas ago, other than a toe. Also, it has helped with bone pain, something David has constantly. He is never without pain, but this drug has lessened it.
The drug is infused via an I.V. over 3 hours for 3 consecutive days. The I.V. port stays in for all 3 days. We go to the hospital at 8 and are usually home around noon.
I hope this helped answer some of the questions.
Feel free to ask more as they arise.