never miss a thing: White Blood Cell Count and the Justice League

Friday, April 18, 2008

White Blood Cell Count and the Justice League

So normal results for WBC are 4,500-10,000 white blood cells/mcL (cells per microliter)
or 4.5-10 range.

a few weeks ago I had a 25.7 count - abnormally high. it's weird i always have healed extremely fast so i just attributed it to being a very good healer. (interesting side note that i found out: emotional or physical stress can increase your count... hmm... don't know anything to be stressed about, do you?)

last week i had a 14 count- still high, which is why i didn't haven to have neulasta last week with treatment. (yay!)

but this week my counts are right at 5. just above normal. rats-- so much for the super healer theory (and there goes my chances of joining the justice league.) What this means is that i {might} have to have neulasta going forward. but starting next tuesday I am going to go on Neupogen - supposedly similar side-effects as neulasta but not as severe. hopefully that will work just as well so I can avoid neulasta if i can. the positive note was that the nurse said it looks like my body is trying hard to heal itself b/c of my neutrophils or some medical term that went over my head...

on the topic of things that go over my head. I have school tomorrow and sunday and am currently reading a paper on global climate change. yes, it is just as fun as it sounds. but this means that i am back on treatment days being opposite school weekends. rock on!

oh and PS -- We had pope police on our roof today (for those of you that haven't been to the grandeur that is LIC - our building looks over to the UN and apparently our roof was perfect for snipers) TOO COOL!

3 comments:

cary said...: pope police!; April 18, 2008 at 10:04 PM
Mallory family said...: White blood cell count doesn't determine your ability to be a part of the justice league...being strong enough to take on the world, go to school, continue working, making awesome shirts and still taking care of your friends while you are dealing with freaking cancer makes you forever an honorary member of the justice league. Plus if you can morph or something. That would help...; April 19, 2008 at 4:40 PM
Kate Richardson said...: Wahhhaaha! We need to start working on what your super powers are, what is your super-hero name going to be? How about your costume? I want to see a drawing! I was always partial to "American Maid" from The Tic. She wore an American Flag themed maid's outfit and threw her lethal high heals at villains.

Love it!

Happy Earth Day. Enjoy your Global climate change paper. Mmm, uplifting.

Kate; April 22, 2008 at 8:11 AM

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the back story:

So, a couple of months ago my mother told me that one of my good friends growing up was diagnosed with breast cancer and was currently going through chemo treatment to shrink the tumor before operating.(side note about friend: we were best friends from age 5 when they moved in behind us in the neighborhood until middle school when we moved away- we spent countless hours together and our mothers are still good friends)
so when i found out about her it got me thinking that i had not done a self exam in ages - so a few days later in the shower i found it. i read some about tumors and felt sure that it was benign but went ahead and made an appointment to get it looked at.
a few weeks later i was in the dr.s office and he shuttled me down to radiology to get it looked at. he was more alarmed at the size of the mass than the odds that it was cancerous - so he felt it was better to be safe than sorry and had me to get a sonogram and mammogram that next week. he as well as the radiologist assured that the odds were good that it was a fibroatanoma (benign fibrous tumor) but again better to play it safe and have it biopsied just to be sure.
i hadn't heard back from the doctor so i assumed no news was good news. but i will never forget him calling me back - i was in the nashville airport coming back from our girls weekend and he asked when i was back because he wanted me to come in to the office. i told him preferred to know what was going on now since obviously it was bad news. he said that normally he would rather speak to a patient about this in person but under the circumstances he understood. he then gave me the diagnoses and some numbers to call the next morning to set up appointments with surgeon and fertility specialist.
whirlwind flight back that was canceled and resulted in me having a breakdown with the gate agent (poor guy) and i was forced to spend the night in DC wondering what in the world was happening.
i have since met up with my friend from childhood and she has been invaluable to me going through all of this and i hope that we can both support each other throughout the next months... it is just too odd that we are both within a week in age, have similar upbringings and have this diagnoses so close together. all we can think of is that we both licked the paint off the barbie dream house at some point (we were both huge barbie fans and that was the majority of our play time) or there was something funky in the creek behind our neighborhood. i do plan on doing more research on this because the similarities are just too much but for now i am blaming it on the barbie dream house

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Friday, April 18, 2008

White Blood Cell Count and the Justice League

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