Good Inauguration Morning All:
First of all, congratulations are in order to Brian Reeve and his wife Stephanie on the birth of their third child last night. Brian is training to run in the Leukemia Lymphoma Societies half marathon. A link to his fund raising site appears on both the Blogger and Caringbridge blogs. Can you imagine getting up at the crack of dawn feeding and changing the baby THEN getting up to run 7 miles?! Brian deserves your support (on the fund raising--he's on his own with the diapers).
An update from yesterday . . . my platelets are on the same slow boat that they had been on in prior rounds. I needed to recover to the 60,000 or 100,000 level in order to receive treatment. I was at 45,000 on Friday last week. My counts yesterday showed only a modest improvement to 49,000. The current plan is to have me recover for a couple more days and return on Wednesday with an overnight bag packed. If I'm able to hit the magic number then I may be admitted on the spot. Otherwise, I'll return home to make more platelets--however one accomplishes that.
I'm still ahead of schedule despite this delay so I'm generally upbeat and looking forward to today's festivities which I'll be sharing with Audrey and Nolan.
--Russ.
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Russ - Good luck with the platelet generating! I was diagnosed last summer with a platelet blood disorder, so I am intimately acquainted with that problem! Mine dropped down to 1,000 at one point. Anyway, I love the blog and am glad to hear that things are heading in the right direction for you. I wish you many good platelet makings in the next day so you can get on with the next treatment!
ReplyDeleteTake care,
Allison Rankin
Hi Allison:
ReplyDeleteJust wondering, were you offered any way to influence the production of platelets?
--Russ.
Hey Russ -
ReplyDeleteYeah, I was put on prednisone for about 3 and a half months. It took a couple of days with super low counts before my blood responded to the steroid and the platelet count started to rise. My blood disorder is called ITP and it is simply the lack of platelets, no other symptoms. So while I felt completely fine physically, I very easily could have suffered internal bleeding even by one of the kids jumping on me or some similar common occurance. Anyway, it was a very rough couple of days while my counts were in the single digits (and down to 1 - yikes!), but most of it was mental for me. Until the side effects of the prednisone kicked in, that is.
Actually Russ, now that I think about it a bit more, my hematologist has said that my count could go down to about 30,000 before they would actually consider giving me any treatment for it. It's not until it dips that low that you're at real risk for internal bleeding and then the yucky treatment options are worth putting up with.
ReplyDeleteIt's hard to believe that as relatively young adults, we would have to know so much about blood counts, treatments, etc. Ah well, we take what life gives us and keep running through that bag! Love today's post, by the way.