Saturday, December 3rd I woke up and while laying in my bed I felt like I had wet my pants (gross I know) so I ran to the bathroom and I was bleeding a ton. Then I looked in the mirrior and just then my nose started bleeding and I saw I had blood dots in my eyes called petechiae (peteekia). I know what is wrong because I was diagnosed in 2009 with having an auto immune disease called Idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura or ITP. So I woke Blake and took my time brushing my hair and teeth cause I knew I was going to be in the hospital for a couple of days.
We got to McKay Dee Hospital and they immediately shot 200 mg of prednisone into my arm. Ew! That stuff tastes like stomach bile. And they put an IV in my arm for this expensive medicine called immune globulin. It takes about 24 hours to get in what they were giving me. My blood was low and my platelets were 1,000 (should be 150,000 at least) so they put in a second IV to pump in fluids and do blood and platelet transfusions.
Each day for about 4 days we found no improvement. My body was eating up my platelets as fast as they were pumping them into me. But an 8 hour nose bleed didn't help. So my wonderful Hematologist said I must go to the Huntsman Cancer Hospital because they could help me because he no longer could. I was scared. I thought I was dying. So they sent me up via ambulance. The I had a whole team of people working on me like on House (but my dr was nice). They needed a bone marrow biopsy to make sure I didn't have certain kinds of cancer. That pain was horrific! I think the hospital thought I was dying by the amount of screaming I was doing. I remember it hurt so bad I said "shizzle ma nizzle!" that made people laugh.
Anyway, they said, "We need to take your spleen out. That is the part of your immune system that is killing your platelets." (btw spleens are as big as your fist and weigh about .7 pounds)
So they did platelet transfusions for a full 24 hrs and I couldn't eat. BLECK! Oh and this whole time this little nurse was pumping me full of morphine which makes me insanely sick (didn't know before) and I was puking my guts out. Anywho, feeling like crap I was ready to be put under for the surgery. They wheeled me down to surgery and one the way there my right arm got tingly and numb. It got stiff and I couldn't move it. WEIRD we still don't know why that happened. We also found out before surgery that it was the morphine that was making me so violently ill. But after surgery they hooked up a pain med thing to me which continued to make me violently ill. Later we found out they hooked up morphine. HELLO!!! So the very mention of the word makes me queasy. ECK!
Post surgery my platelets were rising with out the help of platelet transfusions. Yippee!
Now it's a month later and my platelets are above 600,000. Which need to be watched. If they get above 1,000,000 I will be in danger of blood clots.
But I'm mostly better unless they left a sponge in me.
