April 10th, I took my mom to the hospital at 4:30 am for surgery. The plan was to place the PD catheter we had to remove in January after she developed a peritoneal infection caused by removing her appendix (she also had her gallbladder taken out at the same time due to symptoms of gallbladder dysfunction). The surgery started at 6:50 am and at 8:10 am I was told the surgeon needed to talk to me. Uh… that’s bad. It hasn’t been nearly long enough for them to be done yet.
Sure enough, there was a complication. When the surgeon made the first incision, stomach acid dribbled out. Except there’s nothing that close to the abdominal wall to leak stomach acid… So uh oh. And the surgeon asked another surgeon to come in an consult, because that’s weird. It turns out when my mom’s incision wounds from her gallbladder removal began healing, tissue grew around the duodenum (the tube that leads from the stomach to the intestines), pulling the flexible meat tube against the abdominal wall and holding it in place there. There were two options: we had to cut the tissue holding the duodenum, but I could also choose to go ahead with the PD catheter insertion, but considering they’d just nicked the tube going from her stomach and intestines, there was a higher risk of developing an infection as the PD catheter healed. Or we could wait and place the catheter in a month. Also, he added, she has minimal scarring from the previous surgeries and the infection. He didn’t anticipate any problems with PD in the future as a result. And then he called her a super healer. And I had a choice to make, sort of.
I’m not going to do something which will increase the risk of infection. We’ll wait and do it in a month and today, just free the duodenum. They’d already done that and just wanted to know if they should go ahead and place the PD catheter. And no, we’ll wait on that. So they closed her up and she was done. The surgeon told me, he had decided to keep her overnight for observation, because there are a significant bundle of blood vessels in the duodenum and since he’d cut it by accident. They wanted to observe her to ensure the stitches held and she didn’t eat any solid food for 24 hours. I was told it would 1:30 or 2 before I could see her, so I came home for a few hours.
Friday rolls around and it’s almost 2 pm and they still haven’t discharged her. I call and ask the nurse why and she tells me my mom’s white blood cell count is slightly elevated and the doctor was concerned about it. I get that, she did have a massive infection 3 months ago. Interestingly, the day after she finished the oral antibiotics in February from her hospitalization for that infection in January, her white cell count was slightly elevated. Friday night, I went back through all her monthly blood work from dialysis for the past year… sure enough, it’s been “slightly elevated” every month. According to the sheet, average is 5,000-11,000 for an adult. Hers was in the 12,000-14,000 range every month.
And that triggered a memory for some blood work I had done once. Now, I’ve been keeping a “migraine journal” since I was 10 years old and I had several notebooks of health information when computers became a thing. Eventually I digitized that journal and keep the file which starts in August 1990. The first 5 years are entries related to migraines only, it records foods eaten, amount of sleep, general overall feeling and then any migraine auras or other migraine related information. But around 1996, I began to include all health information I had access to. I decided to go back through it and in 2002, I saw my primary care physician for swelling and pain in my right arm, wrist, and hand. He theorized it was something autoimmune, especially since I was struggling with symptoms of Chagrin’s Syndrome (an autoimmune disorder which causes excessive dryness to the mucus membranes because the immune system attacks them – dry eyes, dry mouth, dry skin, dry nasal passages, dry … well you get the picture). My entry says my white cell count was 13,900 and I was sent to a rheumatologist. She did more blood work and my white cell count was 14,200 when those came back, but I was negative for all the autoimmune disease… even Chagrin’s. Except a different rheumatologist had already diagnosed that one, so what? She did the test again and still negative and my white cell count was still very high. She decided to put me on 14 days of antibiotics. After finishing them, my white cell count was still over 13,000 and yes, I had all the symptoms of Chagrin’s and she would have bet money that test was going to come back positive each time and it didn’t… but there was no other cause found for the exceptionally dry mucus membranes either. It was listed as Chagrin’s like and she told me to just tell people I had it, because something weird was going on and she couldn’t explain it. Just like she couldn’t explain why my white cell count wasn’t just on the higher side of average but well above it…
In 2003, while at work, I ripped open my palm on a piece of twisted metal while trying to move a desk. My boss, a doctor, took me to the ER because it said it was deep enough I needed stitches. At the ER, the doctor told us it couldn’t have been that bad, because not only was it completely clotted, the scab was firm. My boss insisted he had seen the muscles in my palm and it needed stitches. My boss told the other doctor he had no idea how the cut sealed itself, it shouldn’t have. The ER doctor decided to test my clotting factor (hint: it’s high) and then he and my boss picked off the scab to check out the cut. And possibly just because they wanted to watch it bleed (they did numb my hand first). The ER doctor agreed it was deep and I needed stitches. Five stitches were put in and I was sent home with instructions not to use the hand much because given the location, I could easily damage the stitches. It healed and the large noticeable scar never appeared. 20 years later, I can see the spot where the cut was and the stitches, but only if I look for it. Part of this is because it’s on my palm and that skin regenerates fairly often. But I don’t have a lot of scars in general. Not from my surgeries, not from my multitude of clumsy injuries… I heal well and I heal fast. And now I know my mom does as well.
I’ve also learned she has a high clotting factor. Leaving me to wonder if the combination of an above average number of white cells coupled with the high clotting factor (I’ve had 2 cuts which needed stitches, scab over by the time I got to the ER) makes us “super healers.” If so, it’s nice to know my immune system is good for something, since my B cells don’t seem to remember previous illnesses and allow me to fight them off quickly and effectively.
Hadena James 