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Update
Although my Dad continued to be diagnosed as NOT having MDS, his blood counts never did get a lot better since the below post. He ended up catching something (fevers of unknown origin) in mid-November, and, after spending 17 days in the hospital in November, and another 46 days in December/January/February...he died on 2 February, eight days before his 68th birthday. He got another bone marrow test in November and there were no chromosome abnormalities in that test, not even the 13th chromosome, so it appears that it did eventually disappear from his system. We still do not know what caused his fevers (other than the fact that he was neutropenic). His December hospital stay resulted in one calamity after another: he got aspiration pneumonia and ended up in the ICU for 12 days (was on a respirator and because of his low platelet level he almost died when he had a bleed in his lung). He made it out of the ICU, but then contracted a really evil fungus on his neck called mucormycosis...they had to remove a large part of his neck to get rid of it and then started him on some really horrible anti-fungal medication. In the end, he contracted pulmonary edema from the hospital giving him too many fluids (mainly blood products) in preparation for a surgery to debride his wound. I am sorry for posting such a depressing update, but since I visited this site last year many times, I thought I'd post a final follow-up on my dad. We still don't really know if he actually had MDS or not, but based on the fact that his blood counts never really improved, I believe he may have.
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