She’s recovery now, surgery went well.  Can’t wait to get in and see her!

Just got a phone call from surgery, Ana is stable and doing well and the surgeon has started working on her (roughly 25 minutes ago).

On a side note, there’s gotta be a better way to notify me of updates.  The waiting room librarian walking over and saying she’s going to forward a call to me, scared the HELL out of me.  Honestly, it felt like my heart was going to jump staright out of my chest.  Damn, gotta calm down now.

Well she’s in surgery now.  In roughly 2 hours that evil spleen will be no more!

184,000, IV getting started and the surgeon is en-route.

Hi everyone –

Ana is all checked in here at St. John’s Hospital.  The splenectomy is scheduled for 3pm so we’re waiting in a little hallway with curtains called pre-aenestesia. 

Since Ana has surgery tomorrow at 3pm and they told her that she can’t eat anything after midnight, the only logical thing to do is to have a feast around 11pm the night before!

So, Jay and Katherine are here and we’re getting ready to throw some steak and chicken on the grill.

This is our Easter dinner, since our typical plans got interrupted when the doctors told her she had to get another treatment of IVIG today.

Ana has been seeing a new doctor for her ITP these past couple of months.  His recommendation has been to get her spleen removed since it appears to be the source of her platelet issue.  In preparation of the surgery, which was to be in a couple weeks from now, she has been weaning off of the prednisone and getting her immunizations.

Last week, since her platelet counts were low (12,000ish if I recall), the doctor ordered several days worth of IVIG.  At the end of the week she was well over 100,000 and it was expected that that would last for a few weeks until the surgery.

Bzzzzt.  Wrong.  She got tested this morning and was at 8,000.  So she’ll be getting 3 more days of IVIG (this Thursday, Friday, and Saturday) and then go in for surgery on Monday.  Wow, that was fast.

We’re still learning details, so I’ll keep you up to date as we learn more.

Ana had her 2-week visit with the new hematologist, and her platelets levels were the same as they were 2 weeks ago so that apparently finally “proves” that prednisone isn’t helping.  Glad it took 5 months for that to be clear.

Anyway, she’s going to start the weaning process – dropping her dosage 10mg/week while continuing to get blood tests every week.  The plan is to see if once she tapers down slowly her levels stay where they are – they are low (51k) but definitely manageable.  If they don’t continue to drop, they’ll call it good enough and, I presume, just test her every now and again as well as us being on the lookout for the symptoms of the low platelets.

If on the other hand she does drop again after stopping the prednisone, it’ll be time to look at the spleen removal as the next phase.