Diagnosis

A day after leaving Target Field for a local hospital because of to shortness of breath, center fielder Adam Jones was back in the Orioles' starting lineup Wednesday and making jokes about his potential health scare. "I wanted my mom," joked Jones, who left Tuesday's game in the second inning. "I called my mom and said, 'Mommy, come fly to Minnesota and come take care of me.' " Jones said he had no trouble when he batted in the first Tuesday, but when he went out to the field in the bottom of the inning he couldn't catch his breath.

There was something different about Marisa. "The moment she was born, she was blowing bubbles," recalled her father, Joel Easterly, 32. "Some of the nurses were saying, 'Wow!' They'd never seen that before. " Bubbles seemed innocuous enough. The pregnancy had gone well, the delivery was quick and Marisa was a healthy 6 pounds 4 ounces. But it was the first hint of an extremely rare medical ailment that has been reported in about 30 people worldwide. The problem, caused by a genetic deficiency, has exhausted the young family physically, emotionally and financially.

Baltimore's deputy mayor is a dark-eyed, statuesque beauty, and she looks like she belongs on a runway, stepping out in a designer gown. "I could never walk down a runway and have people look at me," says Kaliope Parthemos, her long fingers fluttering nervously around her face as she speaks in her City Hall office. "I mean, I am 6 feet tall. I already draw all the attention when I walk in a room. " But that's where the 40-year-old Baltimore native will be Saturday night: In Hunt Valley, wearing designer dresses and borrowed gems and raising money for the fight against breast cancer . She was diagnosed with breast cancer herself barely weeks ago. She never thought a trip down a runway would be part of her journey.

Since she first entered politics, state Sen. Lisa A. Gladden has kept a secret. More than a decade later, she wants to share it on her own terms: Gladden has multiple sclerosis. It's not all that dramatic, she says. Except for a weak left eye, the 46-year-old Baltimore Democrat says she is symptom-free. So why is she going public now about a condition she has kept to herself, her family and a handful of friends since she was first diagnosed in 1995? Gladden says she's tired of keeping the diagnosis a secret — as if it were something to be embarrassed about.

Congratulations on your in depth article on Baltimore Behavioral Health and the over diagnosis of mental health problems among the addicted entering recovery ( "Hooked on treatment," Nov. 7 and "Sheltered addicts, strained recovery," Nov. 8). I am a practicing clinical psychologist in private practice and in a transitional housing facility for homeless recovering addicts in Baltimore. Yes, affective disorders are over diagnosed among the recovering population and yes, any differential diagnosis between addictive behavior and mental health problems is nearly impossible until the addict has had a few weeks of sobriety.

After feeling a mass deep inside the tissue of her left breast, Sandra Gray faced a series of uphill battles that seemed unusually daunting. First, the longtime Columbia activist and wife of former County Councilman Vernon Gray had to convince doctors last August that the breast cancer was actually there because they couldn't detect it, she said. Then, she had to drum up physicians' support for a modified radical mastectomy, because surgeons balked at removing the breast when cancer still hadn't been found on a mammogram.

It's not that he has trouble expressing himself in words. After all, at the tender age of 20, he's already written an autobiography. But when he tells his story, as he did recently in Baltimore, the young man from Zimbabwe often points to a painting of his that he brought from Africa. It shows a figure standing at an open door, about to step out of a darkened room and into a place showered in brightness. The meaning isn't hard to grasp. The figure depicts the artist himself, the soft-spoken yet confident Tichaona Mudhobhi.

Sewall W. "Susie" Mann, a lifelong athlete who was known as the "Daredevil Granny" and who embarked on an odyssey of adventures that included sky diving and swimming with dolphins after receiving a diagnosis of terminal cancer last summer, died of the disease Feb. 15 at Stella Maris Hospice in Timonium. The Mercy Ridge resident was 79. After a long history of cardiac disease, Mrs. Mann, who was known as "Susie," had successful bypass surgery last March, only to find out four months later that she had terminal stomach cancer.

My Brother died this past November, after a three-month illness in which he was neither diagnosed or treated for any specific disease. He spent one week in a local hospital, four weeks at Johns Hopkins and didn't eat a square meal for three months. A team of the best doctors available came up empty handed regarding a diagnosis or treatment, so brother Dorsey eventually dwindled away and died. It is a known fact that medical marijuana enhances the appetite and mood, but not one doctor was able to prescribe medical marijuana, which alone might have saved Dorsey's life.

Most men diagnosed with prostate cancer in the past two decades never needed to know they had the disease, leading many to treatment that can do more harm than good, according to a new study. The findings, published in Monday's Journal of the National Cancer Institute, found that since a blood test became the standard way to screen for prostate cancer, an additional 1.3 million men have been diagnosed with the disease. But because many men are diagnosed with cancer that will not cause symptoms and will not kill them, the screening tests save few lives, the authors conclude.