Nothing New....

Some of you may have seen a Facebook post or heard some news about Matthew bleeding and a low platelet count.  Fortunately, it turns out that both of those are a problem. 

Matthew started bleeding from his stoma on Sunday evening.  The stoma is a result of the colectomy Matthew had last May.  My Dad took him to the emergency room because of the fear of excessive bleeding as a result of his low platelet count.  The bleed stopped, and they did scans to check for internal bleeding, which came back negative.  However, they told Matthew that his platelet count was a 20--which is extremely low.

A couple days later Matthew went to the oncologist. The oncologist tested his blood and found that his platelet count was in the 60's.  His thoughts were that they did not test Matthew's blood quickly enough, and his platelet clotting occurred causing the count to be inaccurate.  He sent him to LabCorp for another count (immediately after testing it in the office) to test his theory.  The blood count from LabCorp came back as too low to count.  This confirmed his theory that the hospital's count was inaccurate.  He also told Matthew that bleeding from the stoma was very common (which nobody had mentioned before). 

Therefore, despite the scare.  Matthew is still in the same place he was in last week.  His counts haven't gone up yet, but the doctor doesn't seem concerned.  So, we just hope that he needs more time.  The next step at this point is scheduling his colon resection.  This is not on the books yet, but they are hoping for the end of April. 

Thanks for the continued thoughts and prayers.