Darla's Website Pages

My symptoms started when I was pregnant with my third child. I had High Blood Pressure throughout the whole pregnancy. My doctor put me on medicine but it didn't seem to help, my BP would go up and down. He took my daughter at 36 weeks gestation and she was born with a cyst on her ovary which was removed (along with her ovary) 5 days after she was born.

My BP stayed high so that my doctor referred me to an Internist 4 weeks after I had my baby. I told the Internist that my sister had died due to complications resulting from Pheochromocytoma. The doctor acted as if I was crazy, because I was so overweight (which was from just having a baby). He put me on several medicines which did bring my BP down at times. He didn't want to run test on me for Pheo because he said it was expensive and some insurance coverage didn't pay for it.

Then, almost a year later he did finally run some blood work on me which came back with elevated "something" and he suggested a MRI, which confirmed I definitely had a Pheochromocytoma.

I then had open surgery which kept me hospitalized for 11 days. The Surgeon that removed my Pheo was close with the doctor that had dealt with my sister. He wanted to do open surgery to get all of it, to try and stop it from coming back, which my sister had.

My sister's problems started when she had 2 softball size cyst on her ovaries when she was pregnant with her daughter. My sister had her cysts removed after her daughter was born.

My surgery was in Oct 98 and I am feeling fine now but I am so scared of this coming back.