Bad genes

amaryllis in full bloom

more stained glass

I bought this vintage dress..never had been worn but....very short. I do have 'good' legs but am a bit old perhaps for a mini dress. Lace bicycle shorts underneath?

sleeve detail. If I do wear this, will have to stay away from red wine, which I seem to dribble everywhere

Promethease is a service that you submit your raw DNA data to and it will check the DNA snippets for various medical conditions. It is not a full gene sequencing service. They recently updated their database and I resubmitted my data to them. I had the bad medical conditions listed first.

Number one: My DNA indicates that I probably have the BRAC2 gene. I found this very disturbing. Although it isn't as lethal as the BRAC1 gene, it is associated with increased chance of ER+ breast cancer (I had ER-) and ovarian cancer. Medical advice is usually double mastectomy and ovary removal. Furthermore, it is autosomal dominant so that my kids each have a 50% chance of inheriting it and thus should be tested. Also it means that one of my parent's had the gene. Which one? No history whatsoever of people dying young or even old with cancer on either side though my mom and her sister had ER+ breast cancer when they were old and it was early stage. This was not a day brightener! It was very expensive to test for the BRAC1/2 deletions in the recent past due to a company having a monopoly on the gene. This since has been overturned so tests now are one tenth  to one thirtieth the cost. Insurance would pay only if I were younger than 50 when diagnosed, Jewish and/or had a strong family history. I was 54 when diagnosed. A few years later they changed the age to 55. I was ready to do it a few years back when I was told I had a recurrence but when I found it was a false alarm, I dropped the testing.

So how worried should I be? As it turned out, not much. I am not the only one who got this result as they are finding that 50% of people whose dna was tested by Ancestry got this bad result. And upon further testing, they didn't have the gene at all. Maybe I will have my doctor OK the test at my next physical. Naomi's doctor keeps bugging her to bug me about it.

Other bad genes: peanut allergy (I don't seem to have one though one grandson does), a gene for high probability of thyroid disorders (yes, I had Graves' Disease), a gene making me likely to have a stroke (I usually have low blood pressure and my lipid levels are low) but my favorite bad gene is one that presumably causes me to have no empathy for people. What? By some definitions, one who has no empathy is considered to be a psychopath. Am I a psychopath? I don't really think so as I do worry about others' pain. I certainly don't want to distress those that I like. Do others feel more for others? I have no way of telling. I do know my father was so self involved that he could care less about how others felt, especially my mother. Interestingly, the polar opposite of being a psychopath is to have anxiety disorders. I don't seem to have anxiety but somehow some, if not all of my kids do. And my father who really could care less about how people felt was chock full of absurd anxieties so I am having a hard time believing they are opposite conditions.

So this gene testing so far is like a horoscope. sometimes they get things right but other times, totally miss the mark.

Snow again. I was able to run outside for the past 3 days though not comfortably as windchills were close to zero. I will leave next week for the tropics. We had dinner last night with Josh's family. Miss Hannah still refuses to even look at me.