October 5, 2010

Tuesday, October 5^th, was the day my life was turned upside down.  I was working out at the gym and for the first time I did not have my phone on me.  I get in my car at about 10:30am to find I have about 5 missed calls starting at about 9:30 in the morning from my sister, my mom and my dad (who lives in Austin).  I knew something wasn’t right.  The first voice mail I listened to was from Katie.  All I could hear was her crying and I couldn’t make out anything she was saying.  The next voicemail was from my mom and all it said was “Kim, call me immediately.”  As you can imagine I did not even get to the third and fourth voice mails and I called my mom right away.   My mom was with my sister (Katie) at this time and Katie got on the phone and told me she received a call from the doctor she saw on Monday and he said “you need to get to the nearest hospital immediately, within the next hour.”  I guess he had just received her CBC results.  He told her that her platelets were dangerously low (11) and her white blood cell count was high (25). She told me right now she is at North Hills Hospital waiting to be direct admitted. From here it is a whirlwind.  I know by noon we knew her platelet count was <10 and her WBC count was 55.  Around 1pm the hematologist came in and told us by looking at a blood smear he is confident she has leukemia.  He was unsure at this point what kind of leukemia it was but that he wanted to proceed with a bone marrow biopsy immediately and that we needed to start chemo soon.  By late afternoon her platelets remained below 10 and her WBC count was 110.  So this was a fast moving cancer.  Out of 110 white blood cells, 106 were blastocytes (cancer).  So 96% of her white blood cells were cancer as I understood it.  At around 2pm we were doing the bone marrow biopsy in her room.  This was done with no sedation, only lidocaine to numb the skin and deep tissue.  I was holding her hand the whole time and coaching her through it.  It was the hardest thing for me to watch my own sister have to go through that much pain and nothing I could do for her.  Well, we did get through that although Katie says she will never have that done again.  She did receive blood this evening.