Absolute Neutrophil Count

First I must say I am shocked that someone would make a painting of an absolute neutrophil count chart but there this was on the internet.  I can, however, understand that someone would find beauty in their neutrophil count making a linear ascent to over 1000.  It is Annie's ANC that determines if she may leave the house or not.  If she may be in places where we don't know the health status of every person.  It is what kept her out of school for four months the last time she had immunosuppressive therapy.  So we were happy to learn from today's blood count that her ANC had gone from 540 to over 2000.  Anything over 500 means she can go to school.  Below that it's shut in.  This is quite a jump since Tuesday however she had a tickle in her throat this morning and the body ups production in response.  Whatever the case her doctor seemed pleased that her bone marrow got busy doing anything.  

Here hemoglobin and platelets stayed pretty steady at 9.4 and 22,000 respectively.  Since she has been transfused for both within the last week there is no way to know yet if any of that is due to her ability to produce and retain cells.

Most of the doctor's appointment revolved around tweaking medication doses to get her CSA (level of immunosuppressive medicine) up to the desired range while starting to wean her off the prednisone and blood pressure medications slowly so as not to trigger the serum sickness they are meant to prevent.  Since no red flags were raised during the meeting we were relieved.  Thus we'll try and keep her healthy and out of trouble, while enjoying as much of her normal routine as possible, while we wait and see if her body can produce adequate numbers of blood cells without destroying them.  This process doesn't happen over night but instead over months.  Her twice weekly blood tests will give us a glimpse into her progress.  Thus I will update Monday evening once we know her lab results from that day.  We are, as always, grateful for the support that has gotten us this far!