Denise’s Health For the past 6 years or so, we’ve seen a great change in our daughter’s health and appearance. Denise is 49 years old and until seven years ago was very healthy of medium weight, etc. In just one year she went from being an attractive young woman to someone we barely recognized. At first, we hesitated to say anything, worried about hurting her feelings about her appearance but several years later as her appearance continued to degenerate, we confronted her and asked her to go in for a complete physical checkup….she put us off for several years and then in 2009, said she had and everything checked out ok….we now believe either she is lying about testing to us or her physician was incompetent. Symptoms Her face coloring is greenish-gray with large brown splotches while her upper body, chest, arms and hands look reddish like a sunburn. Her face is swollen and rounded. She says she has allergies…but they never go away, her eyes are sometimes swollen and water a lot. She always had good skin and now has deep sebaceous cyst/cysts on her face….starting about the time we started seeing changes in her appearance. She always had a pear shaped build….now it is apple shaped with a lot of weight on her stomach and back while her legs remain more slender…absolutely the opposite or where she put weight on before which was in her hips and legs. She seems excessively tired and at times irritable. We cannot discuss what is happening with her…she shuts us out. She was having lots of daily Anxiety attacks but is getting medication for that for the past year. Before that, she was incredibly excitable at times too. She complains of back pain and says it feels ‘tired’. After exploring these symptoms on internet sites, the only thing we found that that fits what we see is Cushings Disease and asked her to have her Dr. test for it. She said when she told her Dr. our concerns; he laughed and blew it off…so we don’t know if she was tested for Cushings or anything else. But, of course, the Dr. had never seen her before this all started. I have to say that even if she were a stranger, I would know that this person is quite ill by her very appearance without ever knowing her before. We’ve tried on multiple occasions to confront her about this…we are now seeing her only once a year since we assume she doesn’t want us to see how badly she looks. Could the pills she is taking for anxiety affect further tests….like Cushing’s for instance? What else could these symptoms be? She does drink wine on the weekend but I’ve never seen her drunk or have smelled excessive alcohol on her…she does smoke a few cigarettes a day and doesn’t eat excessively but has gained weight in the past 6 years. She is approximately 5’7 and 165 pounds. Wears a 14 (‘large’ shirt) and 10-12 slacks now….before she was wearing 10s. What do you do with a 49 year old woman, a beloved daughter, who we believe is slowly permanently injuring her health by neglecting/ignoring these symptoms. She was once considered beautiful and seems to have lost all concern about her appearance which tells me she is also depressed. (For instance, her college age son complained about her appearance when she visited him at school…he was embarrassed, she laughed about it, which I found odd). Do we do an intervention? Do we fly in and take her to a specialist against her will?….Her husband is weak and self-absorbed with some health problems in 2010 of his own (blood clots in his legs and lungs) but has done nothing to take care of her situation for some 6-7 years, in spite of our persistent requests that he force the issue with her. What can we do???