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Old Sat Feb 10, 2018, 10:50 PM
DanL DanL is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2010
Location: Denver, CO
Posts: 590
Ali,

I'll start off by stating that I am not a doctor. I am a long-term MDS patient, and was diagnosed with blood disorder back in 2010 as the result of a routine physical where I asked my doctor to draw some blood. After that appointment, I found out that I had pretty normal white and red blood cell counts, but I only had about 26k platelets (about 1/6 of normal). I was immediately referred to a hematologist. After several months of guessing that I had ITP (idiopathic thrombocytic purpura), or low platelets for an unknown reason, we finally did a bone marrow biopsy and discovered that I had MDS.

Reviewing your numbers, there really isn't a lot of information there that would indicate healthy marrow or unhealthy marrow. Blood tests are a moment in time, and don't really give a good picture, unless you have a series of them to look at showing a trend. I'll give you an example - with my recent blood counts, I have had white blood cells ranging from 4.5 (normal) to 15,500 (abnormal high). Without knowing that I was fighting a pretty nasty infection, the high number might be disconcerting. As the infection was treated, my white blood cell counts dropped, but then my platelets dropped from normal (175k) down to 96k, which is low. This is because I picked up a viral infection and was taking antibiotics that have a tendency to knock down platelets in some patients.

To a person with bone marrow failure disease, your platelets, RBC, and HGB and HCT appear a little low based on overall population averages, but are pretty darned close to normal. People with bone marrow failure frequently have numbers that are horribly out of line - hemoglobin of 8, hematocrit of 25, platelets below 50k, white blood counts below 2.0.

Seeing a hematologist is probably a wise step to take just to be sure that there isn't something wrong, but the lower numbers could be the result of an infection, vitamin deficiency, or other process, just as much as it could be from something more serious.

I hope that this turns out to be completely benign, but know that you have a lot of good resources available on this forum if you should need them in the future.

Dan
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MDS RCMD w/grade 2-3 fibrosis. Allo-MUD Feb 26, 2014. Relapsed August 2014. Free and clear of MDS since November 2014 after treatment with Vidaza and Rituxan. Experiencing autoimmune attack on CNS thought to be GVHD, some gut, skin and ocular cGVHD. Neuropathy over 80% of body.
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