[David M]

Let me slightly amend something I said earlier... In all fairness, the medical doctors I have dealt with DID ask a few things about my environment. For example: "What is your job?" "Have you had any contact with benzene?" Typical stuff like that... but it didn't go much deeper. And of course there was considerable medical history that we discussed.

Speaking of medical history, one of the first things that I did -- and this was of GREAT interest to me but didn't seem to be of much interest to the doctors -- I went back and tried to gather up ALL the CBCs (and other blood work) that had EVER been done on me from all of the doctors that I had ever been to. Since I had not moved much, most of my reports were located within a 30-mile radius of home, but still, it took considerable effort and persistence on my part. I went to my hometown doctor, a doc-in-the-box that I had been to a few times, a couple of different ENTs, a lung doctor, and a few others I had been to for various things through the years. I was not able to retrieve all the CBCs, but I found enough to piece together a decent picture of my counts from about 10 years before my pancytopenia was "noticed" in 2000. From this information, it looked like my counts were always on the lower end of normal -- but not below normal. (Perhaps they were trending downward very slowly even back then?). This information was available, but it was totally up to me to take the the initiative and go out and collect it. Helpful? I don't know. Interesting? Definitely!

My point in all of this discussion is -- I feel at this point my doctors are just watching and reacting to symptoms as they slowly present themselves. I understand that maybe that is just the nature of this beast -- this is a very rare condition and they do not know what else to do but to watch and react... And, when we think of percentages of patients and how they can help the most people with their limited time, doctors are very busy... and I am just one patient among their many patients, and I happen to have a near-unique problem. They just cannot afford to spend much time on me when so many others are out there they can help. I totally get that.

But when it appears that my bone marrow is failing in slow motion over a period of several years, it seems there is time to check some things, to probe into environmental factors, and to try and identify things that might be slowly killing my bone marrow. So, if anyone is going to do this detective work, it is once again going to be me. However, I am not a doctor or a detective, so it is difficult sometimes to know quite what to do or where to start.

Thank you, my friends, for your help and experiences and insights in all of this. Sorry for rambling on... Your responses have been very helpful, as is this forum in general.