Why did they...

On Saturday morning when I was in the ER the doctor in there came in and said she was going to give me platelets. My platelets were at 22 and the folks at MDA generally don't transfuse unless they happen to dip below 10. (as random bleeding can occur in the brain at that point) I mentioned this, the fact that they don't normally transfuse me unless I am sub-10, to the doctor on Saturday morning and she said that she thought it would prevent potential problems during the weekend and then she offered to call my doctor. Which at 2am in the morning is more of a threat along the lines of "if you want me to wake him up...". I declined, she transfused. And it added another 2.5 hours to us being in the ER.

Today when my blood Dr and her team were looking at my records the first Dr asked me, "Why did she transfuse you? She didn't leave any notes." I told her I wasn't sure. That I had told her the "under ten" rule of thumb and she had still insisted on transfusing me. Then the other, head blood doctor came in and looked at the chart and said, "Why did they transfuse you? Where you symptomatic?" Again we explained.

It's funny, the more I see of doctors the more I realize how much, especially at MDA, medicine is focused on specialties so the blood doctors roll their eyes when an ER doc does something like transfuse at that "low" level without symptoms and the ER doc wonders why the Cancer docs weren't more concerned.

The good news is that they have decided to hold off on giving me shots until they see if my platelets are trending upwards and how quickly. (Which is nice because while the shots help, I'm not fond of the flu-like symptoms they bring with them.)

I still need to write up the "funny" goings on with our garage... oh well, consider this a teaser.


~B.
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