Wednesday, February 8, 2012

What's going on in there?



The results of Annie's biopsy came in and, fortunately, she still only has one serious condition ... instead of three.  Things can always be worse and we are grateful there was no evidence of MDS or leukemia in her bone marrow.  Since we're on the topic of bone marrow here is a short primer on what aplastic anemia looks like on the inside.  First, the name.  "aplastic" means empty and "anemia" refers to blood cells.  Thus Annie's bone marrow is "empty of blood cells."  When they look at a slide of her bone marrow under a microscope it looks like the bottom picture above.  Mostly a lot of empty, white space.  Someone with normal blood counts would have bone marrow that looks like the top picture.  Bone marrow filled with cells.  Now if a cure were only so simple :)

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