Markus’ Blog

I learned on Friday, from my Dad, that my Grandma’s leukemia apparently took a rapid turn for the worse. She had been first diagnosed last summer, but it turned out quite quickly that her illness was quite stable and not progressing. Also, it didn’t cause her any symptoms or discomfort, except in rare instances.

I phoned her Saturday morning (Saturday evening her time) to find out how she’s doing, first hand. This is what she told me.

As her symptoms worsened, it was found that her platelet count hat dropped to 65,000, which is not good at all. One should at least have 100,000. Normal would be 120,00-130,000. (Just checked Wikipedia, and there they say a healthy person has between 150,000 and 400,000 platelets per mm³.) Now she has to go in and get several transfusions which take 7.5 hours each (because they have to drip very slowly) in an attempt to get her platelet count up to 100,000. I also found out that one such transfusion costs EUR 6,000.00. That’s CAD 9,230.49 according to XE.com. Yay for a good health care system that takes care of that kind of stuff. Once that works, it’s on to chemotherapy for her. Not much fun, for sure, but better than the alternative. If her platelet count doesn’t go up, it looks like there isn’t much that can be done.

Her routine checkup had been scheduled for this week three months ago. As it turns out, three months may have been a little long of a wait, since it got to the point where her symptoms worsened considerably the week before she was scheduled to go in.

Her physician suggested she may have been suffering from this blood disease for longer than just 8 or 9 months. It’s just, she didn’t have any symptoms, so nobody looked for a blood disease before then. It has also been found that her heart and her spleen are enlarged, which makes her abdomen hard to the touch.

I am holding my thumbs and crossing my fingers that the treatment works. She sounded calm and confident when I talked to her. She’s a tough girl.

Way to go, Grandma. — Zeig’s ihnen, Omi.