Blood Counts

I decided that a lot of people probably don't understand exactly what I mean when I say that we are waiting for Tony's blood counts to come up. So here is a short lesson on blood counts. There are 3 things that they are mainly focused on: White blood cells, red blood cells, and platelets.

White blood cells: White blood cells are the things that pretty much make up your immune system. They fight off illnesses. When you are neutropenic, it means you don't have enough white blood cells and are at a high risk for infection. Tony has been neutropenic now for a couple weeks. (In his charts, they put everything in thousands, so when I say 4.2, it means 4.2 thousand). A healthy range of white blood cells is between 4.2 and 10.2. Tony has been 0.05 for the last little while, but in the last few days, that has changed to 0.31, so they are slowly coming back up.

Red blood cells: Red blood cells carry oxygen. You are anemic if you don't have enough blood cells. This is why Tony has been so tired is because of his low red blood cell count. A healthy range is between 4.04 and 6.13. His counts have been hanging out around 3.89 which isn't super low. Usually his red blood counts get much lower, but for some reason, this time, they have really hung in there. He has been really lucky and has not needed a blood transfusion this time.

Platelets: Platelets are the things that clot your blood and stop you from bleeding. It can be really dangerous to have low platelets because you are at risk of bleeding to death. It is called thrombocytopenia when you have low platelets. A normal range of platelets is between 140 and 440. (And remember again, that this means thousand). When you reach 10, you are at a severe risk to spontaneously bleed to death (internally), so they have to give you a platelet transfusion to bring those counts back up. Platelets have a shorter life, so he has had to have several transfusions throughout this transplant. He kept having out of control nose bleeds because his counts were so low. So he usually gets a transfusion about every 3 days.


I hope this makes sense. I am certainly not a doctor, but this is how everything works as I understand it. The doctors predict that if everything goes well, Tony should be able to come home in the next 5-7 days. The big thing are his white blood cells. The other big thing is they need to get him off of all the IVs. He needs to start eating 3 good meals a day so they can get rid of his nutrition bag. He needs to be able to swallow big pills again so they can take down the antibiotic IVs. He still has about 5 IVs so we are just waiting for him to become independent of those. Anyway, there is my lengthy update.