Amdermaa

There is a young, 17 year old girl who attends the Bible Study.  She is relatively new, she didn't attend before we went on furlough.  Anyway, she is enormous, and the first time we saw her I told Tony she had a tumor on her pituitary.  We told them that we wanted to help them get her tested, so this week she went and had an MRI, and sure enough, she does have a tumor on her pituitary gland.  So on Friday the mother ask Tony and I to go with them to talk with the doctor about treatment options.  The doctor is Mongolian, but trained in Germany, and speaks very good (German accented) English.  SO we learned that Amdermaa's pituitary gland is twice the size it should be and her Human growth hormones are so high that they are suppressing all her sexual hormones.  She is 17 years old and has never had her period.  The doctor gave them a prescription for a drug that will suppress the growth hormone, and should then allow the sexual hormones to do their job, but that drug is not available in Mongolia.  The doctor is not sure that surgery is necessary.   She is sending all the scans to a German doctor who comes to Mongolia every year to perform surgery, and he will help her decide if the removal of the tumor is needed.  The down side to that is that if the pituitary is removed, she will have to take hormones the rest of her life, and they AREN'T AVAILABLE HERE.  I will have to get a picture of this girl.  She is almost at least 6'2".  She wears a size 12 shoe.   Her hands look just like a man's, her fingers are as large, wide as Tony's.  This doesn't sound so abnormal for American girls, but for a Mongolian, it is very abnormal.  She is probably 18" taller than most all other Mongolian women.  She is very shy, and awkward because she is so different.  I asked the mother if she had always been large, and she said, no it started when she was 5, she noticed that she could run very fast and her hands grew so large that she couldn't hold on to things and became very clumbsy.  She took her to a doctor then, but they couldn't find anything.  (No MRI machines were available then, they were still under Communist rule)