When Life Gives You Lemons…

Jeff Powell
2 min readAug 30, 2024

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… go somewhere else to deal with them.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

For the last two weeks I’ve provided information about Tinkerbelle and her mystery illness. Here’s this week’s update as a TLDR: she continues to be mostly stable.

As you might recall, our big dog has severe anemia, with a hematocrit of about 17% when it should be more like 40%. (That means, only 17% of her blood volume is red blood cells, and that number is very, very low.)

We still have no clue what is causing her anemia, and the treatment of choice is a steroid, Prednisone in this case. She’s on a wonking big dose of that and so far it might be helping. Might.

Last week we didn’t have the numbers to know that. This time we have two sets of test results and she appears to be mostly holding her own. Her hematocrit dropped less than 1% from after the blood transfusion to this past Wednesday afternoon, but her reticulocyte count is up a bit. Reticulocytes are immature red blood cells, and that number going up means her bone marrow is trying to fix things. So far it’s not nearly doing good enough, but it is improving. There were also good numbers related to white blood cells, but I wasn’t there to hear them and they’re more technical than I can deal with at the moment (for reasons that will become obvious shortly).

Clearly we’re not out of the woods. It is possible that whatever is happening has only been slowed down by the steroid. Alternatively, she might be turning the corner and her bone marrow could recover more fully in the coming weeks, raising her hematocrit. Only time will tell, so we keep giving her the drug and testing her weekly.

So that part of life goes on. She’s not suffering or in pain. She’s mostly just more tired than usual, and she sleeps more as a result. We’re watching her quality of life closely.

In the meantime, I find myself 2000 miles from home helping with another (completely unrelated) issue. As with many similar things the story is not mine to tell. In any case, here I am letting Anne deal with Tinkerbelle while I am out of town (and out of the country) dealing with something even more significant.

My return trip is nominally in about a week, but that might change. As with the dog’s situation, only time will tell about that as well.

Sorry these posts aren’t all that interesting lately. Or perhaps they are interesting in their own way, but they are focused on different (and possibly depressing) topics. Regardless, I’d like to get back to discussing other things again someday. And I will try to do so, just as soon as life cooperates.

Take care.

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Jeff Powell
Jeff Powell

Written by Jeff Powell

Sculptor/Artist. Former programmer. Former volunteer firefighter. Former fencer. Weirdest resume on the planet, I suspect.