Leukemia

Ian was diagnosed with Leukemia yesterday, which has all been kind of sudden. Apparently for the last month or so, Ian has been having problems with his eyes where he loses his peripheral vision for about half an hour. He looked up his symptoms online and it said ocular migraines. After this had this happen on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday he called his brother-in-law who's an optometrist, who told him it probably was ocular migraines but he should go in and get it checked. So on Wednesday he went to another optometrist who found some retinal hemorrhaging. He told Ian he needed to get some blood tests and stuff because retinal hemorrhaging is usually associated with diabetes or high blood pressure or something like that. Ian went in to the BYU clinic later on Wednesday and the doctor didn't really find anything wrong, but told him to come back for some fasting blood tests. So Thursday morning Ian went in. They called him around noon and said his white blood count was over 200,000.
(Though apparently it was so high, their equipment couldn't accurately count it. It was really over 300,000.) They said that he needed to come up here to Salt Lake to LDS hospital right away. (The doctor told us that their oncology ward specializes in blood cancers like leukemia and they are the only ones in the Intermountain west that does.) So Ian came and got me from psych clinicals, told me what was going on, and we came up.

Ian hasn't been sick at all, so this was very unexpected. I didn't even know about his eyes being weird until Tuesday afternoon, and even then we weren't expecting anything too bad, not even really diabetes. Diabetes looks pretty good now though...

They still need to do more tests, but so far it looks like he has Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia, they will be doing more tests to make sure, but the Doctor seemed optimistic. They told us that as far as leukemia goes, that is the best kind to get, and can usually be treated without chemo.

Ian had a central line put in yesterday and last night they did leukapheresis. Basically they have a line coming out of him taking out blood, then they put it through a centrifuge and take out as many WBCs as they could, and then put the blood back in. Ian got really nauseous from it yesterday, but when they did it this morning he did okay. They are planning on doing it at least one more time. He also had a bone marrow biopsy this afternoon, which is one of the main tests they will use to diagnose which kind of leukemia he has.

Ian is doing really well. Except for the leukapheresis and the biopsy, which were really unpleasant, he's been feeling okay, only sleepy. They have him on a medication that makes him have to pee a lot though, so he has to get up every half hour to an hour to go to the bathroom. The poor CNA has to come in every time and test it. Now that is an awesome job.

We probably won't have a definite diagnosis until Monday, but I'll try to keep this updated as things happen.