| Words have the power to heal and Would doc pay for your time? |
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Editor's note: Freelance writer and breast cancer survivor Amanda Enayati contributes regularly to CNNHealth.com.(CNN) -- The first thing I did after receiving what is surely one of the top two or three most terrifying medical diagnoses was pick up the telephone to call my husband to tell him to come home, and my brother to ask him to call my parents, because I couldn't bear their grief as well as my own.You probably wouldn't believe my life. In a certain light it would read like an encyclopedia of tragedy: revolution, disease, isolation, dysfunction, terrorism, failure and withdrawal. Before you check out, let me also tell you that if you were to meet me, you may think a sunnier person never lived.I would repeat those two sentences again a few years later, when I began writing a blog about the surreal turns my youngish life had taken. I wrote every day for a year for whoever cared to log on to read about it. And I tried to make sense of it all. [Read the full article] Standing 3 feet tall, Meg didn't look like her peers. Bald and skinny, her body was aging rapidly because she had a rare genetic disease called Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome.People with progeria wrinkle and develop the same circulation and joint ailments as the elderly -- except most of them die by age 13.Progeria affects 200-250 children worldwide, but research into the disease could offer clues on cellular function and how it affects human aging and other age-related diseases.This week, a study about a possible treatment was published in Science Translational Medicine. Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, is one of the authors.About 30 years ago, Collins, then a young Yale University doctor, met Meg. He realized there was little he could do for his patient, but he couldn't look away."It was compelling to try to understand why someone's body is melting away in the ravages of age," he said. [Read the full article] Atlanta, Georgia (CNN) -- Ellis Hobbs likened his spine to a jelly doughnut, saying that one of his vertebrae "squeezed out the back end" when he took a jolt to the head during a kick return in 2009.His interviewer, ex-Green Bay Packers running back Dorsey Levens, looked concerned as Hobbs described the surgery: Doctors cut into the front of his neck and shifted his voice box to the side so they could reach his spine. Entering through the back of Hobbs' neck was too dangerous.Doctors then took a vertebra from a cadaver and "slid the bone in there like a Jenga piece" to prop the neck back to its natural position, the Philadelphia Eagles cornerback said."After that, they take a titanium plate and they slap it on the front of your neck and bolt it down so it can heal right, and then afterwards, once it heals, you can either take it out or keep it in," Hobbs said, explaining that he left it there because he didn't want to go back to the doctor. [Read the full article] 
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