Adrenal Cancer, or adrenocortical carcinoma is a rare and aggressive cancer characterized by a poor prognosis. Amir was diagnosed in 2013 but symptoms started years before.
One of the most frustrating aspects of this disease is how late people are often diagnosed because doctors, especially family practicioners are so unfamiliar with the disease. It was swelling of his legs (gout) that finally led us to the discovery although all kinds of symptoms appeared years earlier, including Cushings Syndrome and psychiatric changes.
Cancers in general are just cells that grow out of control. In and of themselves, they're not even that dangerous in that they don't do anything, besides grow and spread. How they do kill is when they invade the organs and body structures so that they can no longer function and the body crashes.
Adrenal Cancer is different in that the cancer cells themselves actually do stuff - they are functioning tumors. In Amir's case they produced the steroid cortisol so that when he was finally checked, he was found to have 8 times the normal amount. This explained a lot of the personality changes. After surgery, he dropped from 8 times the amount to 0, and from that point on, he swung the other extreme end and experienced the severe debilitating depression and anxiety.
It is a brutal disease and because it is rare, approximately one in a million have it, there is not much research and not much known about it.
If you have been diagnosed or supsect Adrenal Cancer, first immediately contact the leading experts in the field, like Dr. Hammer in the University of Michigan. Most other doctors and surgeons are unfamiliar and have no experience with this disease and they will not tell you this! Then quickly get yourself into a support group like the support group on Facebook where you can get a lot of answers to questions from an accumulated knowledge that's sometimes better than the doctor's.
And finally, please consider a donation to the Univiersity Of Michigan's research on Adrenal Cancer, a disease that rips families apart and is in desperate need of more research and clinical trial studies.