View Single Post
  #3  
Old Fri Feb 10, 2017, 11:18 PM
Neil Cuadra Neil Cuadra is offline
Owner
 
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: Los Angeles, California
Posts: 2,553
grueter,

It's good to hear that you have been generally so healthy. That makes a big difference when you have a disease like this to contend with.

Your quick call from the doctor, sending you to the hematologist, is also what happened to my wife. She had a routine test, and then came the phone call telling her to drop everything and see a hematologist.

Did the doctor share the bone marrow biopsy lab report with you? It can be instructive if you are trying to understand the medical details. For example, it probably reported your cellularity, measuring the percentage of blood-forming cells in your bone marrow. In some cases, there are so few cells that the doctors can't get a good sample, which is one way to rule out other diseases.

Given your anemia, it's no wonder you are worn out and finding it hard to exert yourself. Since your counts have been dropping, have any of your doctors indicated the threshold under which they'd recommend transfusions? Doctors can vary quite a bit in their recommendations about this.

It's ironic that they'd take 16 vials of blood from somebody who is low on blood, don't you think? But that's not unusual. My wife once had 22 tubes collected in one sitting.

With platelets at 17K and possibly still dropping, I'd think you'd want to have your counts checked more often than every 2 weeks. Of course, it's a bother having to go to so many appointments, but during the early going my wife and I drove an hour to the hospital 3 days a week to make sure she was fully under observation and received transfusions when needed.

What treatment possibilities have they discussed with you so far? Has ATG been discussed?
Reply With Quote