I'll take one of the ITP, please.

Whew.

It's been a busy, busy, stressful, hair-pulling, tear-shedding and ultimately joyful week. For those of you who have missed the email and MySpace updates Sarah and Molly have put out, let me explain:

No, there is too much. Let me sum up:

Monday morning, Sarah noticed a couple of purple-ish dots on Eden's face. During bath time a little later, Sarah saw that these little purple dots were scattered randomly all over her body, like someone had taken a fine-tip purple Sharpie to her. We were curious but not worried at this point--who worries about purple dots, really? But we were curious enough to look it up on the Internets, where we came across enough websites that mentioned these kind of dots in conjunction with call your pediatrician immediately that we decided to follow their advice.

We went in that afternoon and, after the usual check-up and related health questions (are you, your friends, your family, your dog, your neighbor down the street, this guy in Brooklyn you may or may not know, sick at this time or have been sick in the last week, month, five years, entire lifetime, last century?) they drew a little bit of Eden's blood to test. Boy, was that fun. The test results came back with a bombshell: Eden's platelet count was down. Way down. The normal count is 150,000-400,000 platelets per whatever-they-measure, and hers was at 16,000. This was officially bad, because platelets that low meant it would be hard for her to stop bleeding once she got started. The pediatrician tried to play it off all cool by saying, "You can take minute to go home and pack your bags, but you need to be at Children's Hospital within the hour," but we knew he was worried, and that made us worried.

We got checked into Children's a bit later (by the way--Best. Hospital. Ever.) and it wasn't long until the nurses came to check her blood again, get her hooked into an IV, and all sorts of other things that made Eden scream and cry (which made us do a little of the same). The blood test that night came back the same as the pediatrician's, so we settled in for the night and waited for the next morning's blood test. If the morning's blood test came back low as well, the doctor was probably going to need to do a bone marrow biopsy to see if something else was going on, which wasn't exactly reassuring to us and made for a rather long, sleepless night.

Tuesday morning's test came back with not only Eden's platelet count down, but also her white and red blood cell counts down as well--her body was basically not making blood, which made the biopsy that much more urgent. Leukemia--everyone was afraid to say it out loud the night before, but now the word was starting to flap menacingly about the room, and we were getting pretty nervous. The hematologist laid it out like this: Eden probably has something called ITP, but the low platelet count could be caused by internal hemangiomas, and the low white and red cell counts meant that Leukemia or some sort of tumor are definitely on the table. Not exactly news to warm a parent's heart.

...More to follow with the next post. (I know that is a whopper of a cliff-hanger and I know his post is barely coherent and I know there are no photos of the action, but we promised to put something on the blog last night, so we're obviously already late. Besides, Mikey Mosher's getting married this evening and I get to do groomsman stuff in the wedding, so I'm off. More, I promise, once I get back.)



















[UPDATE: Pictures added on 5.14.06, because everything's better with pictures.--ed.]