My Blood

Let's deal with one set of symptoms at a time. Today it can be my blood.

As I said, when I went into hospital my HG count was 5.9 as against the normal count of 13. No wonder I could hardly walk and had little feeling in my fingers!

They thought that I was experiencing an auto-imune reaction to my own red blood cells and that I was destroying them faster than my bone marrow could make new ones. I hadn't been particularly aware of shortness of breath until a few days before my frightened 999 call so whatever happened must have happened suddenly.

An early theory was that it had been triggered by an antibiotic I had taken a little earlier for a suspected infection in my swollen leg and that may still be the best theory there is though I don't think they are really convinced.

So they got a couple of units of my blood and sent them off to be processed to remove any antibodies that might cause them to be killed off and gave them to me. After that I had 3 or 4 days on intravenous steroids which, it appears, are the standard treatment for this condition. After that 60MG of aural steroids plus some follic acid and the imune-supressants were the order of the day until I had been home a couple of weeks when the HG count was looking better.

Gradually the count has risen to a maximum of 10.6 but seems to have got stuck at that sort of level. This Tuesday it was actually back down to 10.3.

I am on only 20MG of steroids now & although I am pleased not to be hungry all the time and pleased to be able to sleep better I do wonder whether I should have a higher dose until the blood is much better. After all, the low HG is one of the two things that is really hitting my quality of life with my concentration and attention span being poor and my energy levels being very low.

I had a bit of a wrestling match with our puppy the other evening and I finished up absolutely shattered and could hardly get my breath back. Ann thought she was going to have to ring 999 again but after about an hour I did recover.

No more fighting with the pup!

Anyway Dr. Watts said it's not uncommon for the count to plateau at about this number but he's going to send the blood off for further tests to see if and why I am still killing off my red cells so quickly. He may try a different immune suppressant, he says.

In the meantime I struggle on.