It's Not All About The Hair

I’ve been a bit distracted from my hair this week, what with surgery and all – including a trip to the dentist for a couple fillings, which was rough enough to put me into tears. I know that using a rubber dam is best practice, but I really, really hate it.

This week, I don’t have anything inspirational in my head. My thoughts are focused on my dear friend and her family because her little boy has ITP, aka “idiopathic thrombocytopenia purpura.” That is a very fancy way of saying that his body is eating up his platelets, which are the cells in our blood that play a key role in clotting. And “idiopathic” means we don’t really know why this is happening… the doctors believe it’s an autoimmune response.

His case is unusual because he had this last year, and it quickly resolved with treatment. I don’t think anyone thought it would come back, but about a week ago it did. Usually, it resolves or becomes chronic.

He had the same treatment as last year, but now, just a week later, his platelets are back at rock bottom. The “purpura” part of the name, the P in ITP, is how you can tell the platelets are low: there is pinpoint purple bruising, plus bleeding from membranes in the mouth and elsewhere. The risk with low platelets is that your body will bleed through microscopic openings in the blood vessels – which happens to all of us every day, but our platelets stop those mini bleeds quickly. Without platelets, it is difficult for the body to stop the bleeding.

There are several treatment options, but of course my frequent prayer is for healing right now, just like last time. I’m scared and sad for my friends, who have to watch their little boy go through this, all while balancing the rest of life’s demands. Being a by-stander is tough – there’s really nothing I can do to make it any better. So I pray every time I think of them, and I am thankful that right now all I’m doing is recovering from surgery and looking for a job, so I am pretty much fully available to hang out with their older kids if needed.

As a side note, this is a tough stage of life for my little friend to be getting lots of needle pokes and bleeding. He just turned five and, developmentally, kids that age have a very black and white view of cause and effect. They may think they did something to cause their illness, or they may decide the IV tube is causing pain because it’s there when they’re feeling pain. This age group also sees any skin break as a threat to their body’s integrity, whether it’s a scrape from falling down, or a needle poke to draw blood. That explains the obsession with band-aids at this age: they think band-aids prevent them from falling apart (as an adult, doesn’t that sound like a great solution to tough times? Hand me a Hello Kitty band-aid and everything will be OK). Needless to say, all the pokes my little friend gets for diagnosis and treatment add up to a traumatic experience.

Please join me this week in praying for peace and healing for my friends. Thank you so much!