My Tuesday morning hemoglobin count was 7.9 and my platelets were back up to 33,000. The threshold they usually use to determine whether or not to transfuse a patient is 8.0. Since I had only been on the three-times-a-day dose of steroids for 24 hours, they decided to wait it out and see what Wednesday’s number looked like. They wanted to give the steroids time to kick in and do their job. Also, there is always a risk with a transfusion, especially when the blood isn’t an exact match. If Wednesday’s number is up then I will likely be able to go home. If Wednesday’s number is down, despite the added steroids, I will have to start IVIG treatment, which is an infusion once a day for three days (this would make my earliest departure Saturday).
Everything came back negative. By process of elimination, it was determined that I have Evans Syndrome. Evans Syndrome is a drop in two of the three blood groups (in my case, red blood cells and platelets) with no underlying cause. The primary course of treatment is steroids. These are used to suppress the immune system and temporarily stop it from destroying healthy cells and platelets. I will likely be on a large dose of steroids for the foreseeable future.
I got to walk around the hospital halls with an aide on Tuesday while wearing a pulse oximeter so they could measure my heart rate and oxygen levels. Luckily, I did so well that they took me off the oxygen mask! As I slept Tuesday night, my heart rate dropped to 45 beats per minute and ICU sent the nurse in to wake me up and make sure I wasn’t crashing. If anything, this just proved that my tachycardia was fading!