Platelets, Kites and Gout

Took our big new space shuttle shaped kite out on the beach for some powerful tugging by the gusty winds, not just on the kite strings, but our mood, upward and open. Mary Poppins was right.

The tangled strings forced us to quit, but we dallied long enough untwisting our twine to catch a Georgia O'Keefe sunset (did she ever paint a sunset?).

As the world turns, the sun drops behind the horizon and the clouds put on a show of pink and orange to melt the coldest heart.

Tomorrow I get my blood count rechecked to see if my platelets were boosted up and stayed up by the IVIG a week ago.

I also asked the hematologist to look at the blood smear for Howell- Jolly bodies. Quite a silly name. Today, everything is automated, and it is quite rare for a doctor to actually peer at a patent's blood. If these purple DNA remnants appear in what showed be a boringly pink hued misnamed red blood cell, they suggest my spleen may have grown back, contributing to my ITP. With a functional spleen, they would never survive a quick trip around the blood stream. The presence of these funny sounding creatures does not definitely prove that no little splenule has seen an opening to take over the clean up process when the mother organ was bagged and removed through a laparoscope a few years ago, but it is suggestive that splenic regeneration is not the cause of my platelets' tumble.

Tomorrow I will be giving a lecture on the rise and fall of uric acid which is the sine qua non of gout. Too high is bad, but too fast a fall may make a painful situation worse.

Ups and downs. The world is full of them. Better learn to live with them, because although you can moderate some, you can can't control them all.

I am trying to listen to my own advice, and feeling pretty good these days.