We Love Primary Children's Hospital!

So we have had a pretty adventerous/scary past two days. Here is the story...On Saturday morning Andrew woke up and I was changing his diaper and I noticed some bruises on his leg, they were light but I pointed them out to Dave but we moved on. On Saturday night I went to the hospital to visit a friend and Andrew fell over on the hardwood floor hitting his head really hard. On Sunday everyone was noticing the large bruise on the back of his head and so it made me remember about the bruises on his legs. I checked them out and they were much darker. We called some family members to get their imput. Of course we worried and all I could think of was "leukemia". Dave counted the bruises and he had about 30 alone on his legs. So I called the nurse at lunch time on Monday when I picked Dave up. She put me on hold and came back saying we had to get into the doctor immediately. So we went into the pediatritian, they took a look and said it could be anything from anemia to leukemia. They decided that we needed to be sent to Primary Children's where they could do some bloodwork. We went up there to the outpatient clinic and they drew blood but they asked us to stay around until we could collect a urine sample from Andrew. While we were waiting our pediatrician called and said we needed to admit Andrew to the ICS unit. We didn't even know what ICS stood for but when we entered we knew it wasn't going to be good because we were surrounded by small children with cancer. After what seemed like hours of waiting the doctor came in to tell us that they were fairly positive Andrew had ITP. ITP is a blood disorder where your body is extremely low on plateletes because you have developed antibodies that are destroying the plateletes. A normal person has at least 150,000 plateletes per cubit milimeter, Andrew had about 4,000. At 9pm they began to administer a IVIG, a tranfusion of plateletes. The transfusion took about 4 hours but Andrew was so good during it all and slept most of the time. After a long night in the hospital, they re-checked his blood and the platelele count increased to about 43,000. That was good but they wanted to double check for leukemia. Luckily, everything checked out good and we were able to be released around 12pm. We have another appointment next week and hopefully the platelete count continues to increase. We were so scarred but he feel so blessed that it was something that was easily controlled and taken care of. Dave and I both felt that leaving the hospital was bittersweet because we were so happy that Andrew was okay but to see all those poor children was just heartbreaking. The nurses, staff, and doctors at Primary Childrens were just amamzing. I don't think that I could have felt anymore confortable at the hospital than they made me. Here are some pictures of Andrew we took when we got home from the hospital. Hopefully these bruises go away soon.



As you can see, Andrew is showing no other signs of an illness except the bruises. We are proud of our brave boy and are so happy that he is still happy!