Diagnosis

The past week or two have been a real roller-coaster...hope mixed with terror, curiosity mixed with avoidance...it's been trying to say the least. Based on my EPO levels (a hormone produced by the kidney to stimulate the production of red blood cells), my doc has essentially confirmed that I have Polycythemia Vera. It's a disorder of the bone marrow that causes it to produce too many cells..in my case RBCs and platelets. This causes the blood to essentially become too thick leading to awful things like blood clots which manifest as stroke, heart attacks and pulmonary embolism. Not happy thoughts.

So, the goals of therapy are to get the blood levels down to normal ranges while reducing the blood's tendency to clot. To do this I take aspirin every day and also get a phlebotomy 2x a week until my levels are normal. A phlebotomy is basically like donating blood except they throw it in the garbage. Here is a picture of me after my first phlebotomy.

I was very nervous going in...but my good friend Kerry came along and held my hand when they poked me with the huge needles. When the first set of IV tubing clotted off almost immediately due to the extreme sludginess of my blood, I got a little bit scared. Happily, nurses are very clever, and they figured out how to use a different type of tubing that was a little larger in diameter. I hear that as the phlebotomies progress and the blood gets thinned out, you can see the difference in how easily it's able to move through the tubing. I'm going again tomorrow, and will video tape it. Yes, I know it's dorky...but I'm doing it anyway :-)