So Then What Happened?

We had to take Jay back to the doctor the following Wednesday. He was exactly one week old. We left our house at 5:30 in the morning to make it down to the Texas Children's Cancer and Hematology center in the Texas Medical Center. I can tell you that as a new parent, sitting in the bright, colorful lobby with young kids around you with little to no hair because of undergoing cancer treatments is one of the most daunting tasks I've had to endure. I wanted nothing more than to just make those kids healthy.

After waiting for what felt like an eternity, Jeff and I took Jay to meet with Dr. Yee, a Pediatric Hematologist. He explained that platelet disorders are very mysterious and that it can be difficult to pinpoint the exact cause. It looked like Gestational
Idiopathic Thrombocytopenia Purpura (ITP), because I too, had developed low platelets, but what really threw him off was that most babies whose mothers had ITP do not have such low counts and they definitely respond much better to transfusions.

He wouldn't call it (Neonatal Alloimmune Thrombocytopenia) NAIT either. NAIT is a rare condition that causes a baby to have low platelets due to an incompatibility between the mother and father. It's only seen in about 1:1,000 births. We would have to get our blood drawn and sent off to Wisconsin Blood Center, one of the leading labs in the United States. It would take a few weeks to know and he wasn't sure we needed to do the testing right away, but suggested we get checked before having another baby.

Jay continued to have his levels checked, because at Texas Children's, his levels had dropped again from 116,000 to 65,000. So we began going weekly to our local pediatrician to have his feet pricked. Poor Jay's feet looked like they had been pounded with a meat cleaver. About a month after Jay was born, he finally reached a high level - over 185,000!!!! I was thrilled when my boy was finally given a clean bill of health.

My delivering OB said it was just a fluke. It would never happen again. I could go on to have a perfectly healthy pregnancy with #2. But in my gut, I knew something had happened to Jay. The etiology of it all was too severe to have just been a fluke. But it wouldn't be until March of 2009, a full year and a half after Jay's birth, that I would have all my questions answered.