war in my blood

So, many of you been asking lately and I have been really bad about putting out everything in a nice, simple public post. So here's the scoop: About a month and a half ago, I got some vaccines in preparation for our trip to Ethiopia. I had had most of them before, but I got a new one because apparently Ethiopia is one of the few countries where there's been wild polio in the last few years and adults traveling to such countries need an adult booster. About three days later, I broke out in a curious rash. I realized that it was clearly a drug reaction and called the place where I got the vaccinations; they told me not to worry about it. In my incredibly poor clinical judgment did not realize that it was in fact, a possible sign of something very bad going on. I am further kicking myself for this because I could have gotten out of one of my harder surgery rotations for a couple days, but that is not really the point.

In any case, I then started to notice some easy bruising. So I went to a doctor, got some labs, and found out I was severely thrombocytopenic (which means my platelets, the cells that help your blood clot properly, were dangerously low.) In fact, I was so low that for weeks I was at risk of spontaneous internal bleeding. I rode my bike (with a helmet) every day and went about my daily business; my brother Noah accidentally hit me in the head really hard with a frisbee. I could have died from that. So the first thing about this whole experience is that I'm really thankful for God keeping me alive the last few weeks.

When I got admitted to the hospital, they gave me platelets and this neat stuff called Intravenous Immune Globulin that is basically purified antibodies collected from the blood of thousands of donors. I was officially diagnosed with Immune thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP), which is basically a fancy way of saying that my immune system freaked out at my vaccine and started attacking my platelets. If you want to read more about this, I have a very thorough .pdf that explains it all in some fairly technical language.

After a few days in the hospital, I was sent home on some more medications, which seemed to be doing well-- last week my platelets were completely normal! I was, however, strongly discouraged from going to Africa, since oftentimes adults with ITP have recurrences. We have successfully rescheduled our trip to December-January of this year and we're very thankful that everything has worked out for that so far.

Unfortunately, I have not yet reached a remission yet-- they tried to start tapering me off the medication last week and my platelets went down. So Maggie & I would really appreciate your prayers as they continue to treat me; we're optimistic about eventually getting a good response, but it's certainly discouraging to see that things aren't working right away.

God clearly wants us in Sandtown this summer, hanging out with the kids on our block and having you over for dinner. So we're heartened to have that leading, and confident that He'll continue to provide for us & protect us in the time to come. Feel free to ask questions here or via e-mail; I will be sharing more thoughts about what I learned through the experience as time allows. Til then, thanks for reading and praying. We have felt an overwhelming amount of love and support from our friends and family during this time!

P.S. If you gave to our trip and didn't get a thank-you note, we're really sorry and we're working on all those right now. Don't worry, we didn't forget about you and don't appreciate you any less!