Low counts make their appearance

This last week on Friday Tim had the lowest white blood counts he’s ever had. It was the Friday after Thanksgiving and Tim, Michael and I had planned out the 5 AM shopping schedule so we could get an Xbox 360, some games and a 2 GB SD card. Tim’s appointment to get blood drawn was at 8:30 with the radiation dose to be administered at 8:15. We even were over at CompUSA at 9 PM the previous evening because they started their after Thanksgiving sale on Thanksgiving! A big crowd but getting on line to check out was the key. We did that to get some Xbox accessories, went home and off to bed to get up at 4:15 to make the Friday sales.

We got what was on our lists in only 90 minutes of check out line waiting. Then it was off to breakfast and into the clinic. As we arrived, we remembered we didn’t bring the sour candies so Tim can mask the taste of the saline solution to flush out his port-a-cath. But we had 15 minutes so we stopped in the clinic first instead of radiation to see if they had any sour candy in a drawer. The short story is they accessed the port and drew blood and we then went down to the radiation clinic. It is actually in the basement of the same building. By the time we got back upstairs, the blood counts were done and Tim’s WBC was 1.0 with his neutrophil count at 0.3. These would normally be 4.5-13.0 and 1.9-10.0 for you and me. So this is quite low and in fact the lowest they have ever been.

That meant we needed to avoid crowds (gee, what did we just do?) and watch out for any infection. In the end, Tim made it through those really low counts and the next time blood was drawn, his counts were 4.7 and 3.5; and that’s within the normal range. He sure has a great recovery capability.

--bob