ITP has been the scariest thing I’ve ever gone through. Watching my son go through it is even worse. But, thankfully, we seem to be approaching a workable future.
After our initial joy with his platelets soaring past 140k a mere 3 days after his injection of win rho, three weeks passed and the bruises came back, along with petechiae. Some of the bruises were doing that swelling thing again, so we rushed him to the ER and his count was 35k. Shit. What was going on?
Our doctor told us that for toddlers using win rho, it was common for oscillations in the count to happen after the initial injection, and to wait a couple weeks and see if they didn’t start coming back up on their own. The win rho, apparently while boosting an immediate count, which is useful in emergencies (such as when the boy first went in at a count of 7k) can actually slow down the healing process by giving the body a crutch to lean on. His toddler body is in a prime state for repairing itself.
It was hard listening to this fellow. Hard trying to take his words to heart and to stick it out. The wanting that magic pill of “just give him another injection of that stuff!” was hard to put down. Fortunately, FMLA (Thanks, Chris Dodd. Thanks, Bill.) came to the rescue and I was able to take off quite a bit of time from work to watch the kid while we sorted out details of getting his g-ma up to larryville to watch him at home. There was no way we’d let him bounce around at daycare with a platelet count of 35k.
So, this was round the end of may, start of june. Every couple of weeks, the poor kid would have to go in for more blood tests. I swear to whatever is out there, if i’m given the opportunity, i will find a way to count platelets non-invasively. Toddlers should just not have to go through blood draws. I’m thinking a near-infrared hologram setup. That’s just off the top of my head. It would have to account for the flow of blood through a section of the body the right size, say the last segement of the pinky finger. A strobing pulse of non-ionizing radiation, either electromagnetic or acoustic, perhaps. Have a computer record the number of two micron wide shadows on the recording medium.
Anyway.
Two weeks go by, and yes, indeed, his platelets have gone up to 46k. Good. Two more weeks. 72k. Good! Two more weeks, 95k! Fantastic!
That was almost two weeks ago, today. At 95k, the doc said it was Ok for him to go to day care, as he could sustain your average active toddler kind of fall without fear of emergency room type trauma. No playing on the big slide though. No swimming lessons, yet. Also, his next blood draw isn’t until the end of this month. The minimum considered normal is 140k. So. Fingers are crossed. We are tentatively hopeful.
Points for guessing the caption (double for the mixed ref). No spra-googling. You can do it.
"Also, I'd like to add I have my father's gun. And a scorching case of hair piece."
