Woke this morning with a racing heart. 130bpm just sitting at my desk. A quick check of my temperature revealed that I was running a low grade fever of 38C. Any form of movement had me breaking out in a sweat and my heart rate soaring to a galloping 160. Bugger!
I phoned Kyra and left a message, she phoned back straight away. She said that the low haemoglobin had been there since before I started on the Azathioprine. Double bugger!! That explained the lack of energy over the Xmas break. Why on earth had my respiratory doctor not noted the low count when I saw him a few weeks back?? Surely the lung diffusion rates were meaningless unless he considered them alongside my blood counts and my blood's ability to actually absorb oxygen? Grrr.
I've got another appointment tomorrow with Kyra for a check over. Could be lung infection.. I live in hope.
It would appear that if it were Lymphoma related I'd expect to see an increase in my white cell count, the white cells crowd out the red cells and cause anemia. I don't think that's the case. Another possibility would be bone marrow infiltration of lymphoma... A bone marrow biopsy would show that.. again I have my doubts but will have to wait and see.
Meantime I've been told to stop the Azathioprine immediately (which is what I wanted when I phoned Kyra) and we shall look at the blood counts etc again when I see the Haematologist on March 10th.
I'll have to crank the prednisone back up. But I guess it's better the devil you know...
Annoyingly I have heaps of work booked for next week. I don't like to tell people I'm too sick to fix their cars because often that's the last you hear from them. Might be time to hire a spanner-hand to do the work I can't do (which is almost every thing right now).
Another post after tomorrow's GP visit. :)
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