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| - I'm going to follow Jacie's example and give you the run down of the whole story. My foot started hurting 2 years ago. It didn't hurt much at first, so I ignored it, then finally went to see a doc who got an x-ray and it didn't show anything. So a year, 2 x-rays, Physical Therapy, and an MRI later, they finally figured out there is an enormous black spot on the MRI that takes up 80% of my heel bone! I had an incompetent Orthopedic doc (military hospitals!) and got a referral for a non-military doctor.
I went to Dr. Singel who immediately told me I need surgery and put in a referral to Dr. Monroe who is not approved by my military insurance and so I ended up with Dr. Fontes. He was super competent and was willing to explain everything to me (which didn't take much since he's the NINTH doctor I've seen and I knew what was wrong with me already, but still!).
He was super thorough and wondered why the other doctors hadn't caught it on X-ray after I showed him my MRI films. He had me take another set of X-rays and showed them to me. The bone cyst (which is what everyone thought it was from the MRI) barely showed up on the X-rays. A bone cyst is a hollow spot of bone filled with fluid and would have showed up as a different density on the X-ray. Dr. Fontes explained that since it didn't show up very well on the X-ray, it's most likely much denser than fluid in that spot. He immediately took pictures of my MRI and X-ray with his cell phone and texted them to his colleage Dr. Hillock (a tumor specialist). Dr. Hillock immediately called him back with the news that the texture and definition of the black spot made it look very much like a giant cell tumor! Yikes!
Either way, I was going to have to get operated on, but I really appreciated Dr. Fontes going the extra mile in defining exactly what was wrong with my foot. Thanks to him, I'll be able to see a tumor specialist to get the proper treatment to make sure the tumor doesn't come back. Thank you, Dr. Fontes!
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