07/05 - 13 days, 16 hours, 35 minutes

Today was an important appointment for Peter.  He was on a course of prednisone for ten days that ended Monday.  As you've no doubt noticed by reading this blog, his platelet counts remained critically low (>20,000) throughout the first week of that treatment, which suggested that the prednisone wasn't doing the trick for him.  So we were expecting this appointment to involve a fairly significant "What next?" kind of discussion.  We were thus somewhat shocked to find that this morning Peter's platelet count was 77,000!  I kid you not. Seventy-Seven thousand. When the nurse gave us the results we both thought "Is that right?  Did they make a mistake?" ... it's just been a while since we got any good news at the hospital, so we were caught a little off guard. In any case, after a little less than 2 weeks of tests and treatment, Peter's platelet counts are once again in the safe range. I think we can all take a moment to thank God for that.

Needless to say, this changes his treatment plan quite significantly.  One of two things has happened.  Either the prednisone works (which would be good because it gives us a fairly low-risk way to treat his symptoms if he goes into crisis again) or else his body has figured out what is wrong and has self-corrected (which would be even better).  We'll actually be able to tell which of these is the case fairly soon.  The doctors have switched Peter to a different immune suppressant (6-mercaptopurine, 6MP) that has fewer long-range side effects, but also takes much longer to have an impact (1-3 months).  If the prednisone was what got his counts up, they will gradually fall over the next several weeks and then climb back up once the 6MP kicks in.  However, if the counts stay up, they will likely just discontinue the 6MP after a few weeks and Peter will be in remission.

As you can imagine, today was a very, very, very good day for us. :-)