Thank you to those who responded to my message. I figured what I was doing wrong and I'm even ashamed to admit the nature of it. I was simply creating a "type" variable (to distinguish between numeric, V and E codes) for each of my 7 diagnoses using the same name. That's why it worked perfectly well when I was only looking at the first diagnosis, but was acting out when I included the other 6 diagnoses.

Sorry to have bothered you with such a simple problem, but I was going crazy when after an hour of staring at my program I couldn't see where the problem was. You are an awesome group of people.

Magda