January 6, 2008

Tom had a platelet transfusion today. Unfortunately his platelets dropped to their lowest ever and signficantly between Friday and Monday. His hemoglobin only dropped .4 between Friday and Monday. We don't know exactly what the significance of that drop is. We do know that platelets are more sensitive than red blood cells.

He went into the doctor's office in the morning to have his blood typed and crossed for the transfusion. At the time Dr. Olsen shared that he and Dr. Mena were now feeling that Aplastic Anemia was a more likely diagnosis and said that it might be good to let Tom's brothers know that the doctors may want to test them for a match for a bone marrow transplant.

Tom headed to the hospital for the transfusion. Just before it ended he got a call to go into his doctor's office to give an additional 7 viles of blood. During the biopsy analysis the doctor doing the analysis felt it was important to check some additional elements, particularly his T-Cell levels. We have no clue how this piece of information fits. T-cells are related most generally to the immune system and more specifically often to one's lymphnodes and are indicators in a diagnosis of lymphoma, something that hasn't come up yet. From what we undersand this additional step in the analysis of the bone marrow biopsy will delay the result/diagnosis for another 10 days. This was very upsetting to me, though Tom didn't mind as much. I think he's willing to put off the impending changes/treatment longer than I am, for reasons that are clearly understandable. We have agreed that we will call Dr. Olsen tomorrow and ask that we get an explanation of what they have found thus far in the biopsy and what clues led them to look for these new elements. I appreciate that the doctors want to get this right, but this is also intensely anxiety provoking. I'll post any additional news tomorrow when we receive it.

Thanks again for the prayers and thoughts.