White blood cell count climbs
Just in time for the weekend, Jonathan Pitre has some medical news for which to give thanks.
Pitre’s blood tests Friday revealed that his critical white blood cell count increased for the first time in 12 days, climbing to 0.3 parts per unit of blood from 0.1. The normal range is 4.0 to 11.0.
The measurement is a key indicator of the state of Pitre’s stem cell transplant: whether or not the donor cells have started to establish themselves in his bone marrow.
“He’s super excited,” said Pitre’s mother, Tina Boileau.
Pitre had a bone marrow biopsy Thursday, a surgical procedure to withdraw red marrow from the back of his hip. Lab results from that biopsy are expected soon.
The biopsy should be able to tell doctors — and Pitre — more about what’s going on inside his bone marrow, where most of the body’s blood cells are produced.
It has been more than a month since Pitre was infused with stem cells drawn from his mother’s hip, but it has been a difficult, anxious wait for those cells to engraft. Engraftment is the process by which stem cells move through the bloodstream to the bone marrow and begin to produce new blood cells.
White blood cells are the first to appear in the bloodstream after a bone-marrow transplant.
In a conversation with doctors Thursday, Boileau predicted her son’s white blood cell count would finally go up after the biopsy, and sure enough, his blood tests revealed the first sign of progress in two weeks on Friday.
“He’s still having fevers, but hopefully this is moving in the right direction,” Boileau said. “I’d like to hear what the doctors say about the biopsy.”
If Pitre’s white blood cell count rises to 0.5 — and if he can maintain that level for three consecutive days — his medical quarantine will be relaxed, and he’ll be allowed into the hospital hallways with a mask. The quarantine is necessary because his body’s immune system was suppressed to prevent it from attacking the donated cells, and it has yet to rebuild itself with new white blood cells.
Pitre has been confined to his room since his Sept. 8th transplant, and has battled fevers, nausea and exhaustion for the past month.
Early in his hospital stay, Pitre was enjoying popsicles, chips and oranges, but in recent weeks he’s been unable to eat anything. He’s being fed intravenously.
Boileau said they’ll celebrate Thanksgiving quietly.
Pitre, 16, suffers from a severe form of Epidermolysis Bullosa (EB), a blistering skin disease that is among the most painful known to medicine. He travelled to the University of Minnesota Masonic Children’s Hospital in August for a stem cell transplant, the only available treatment that holds the potential to dramatically improve his physical condition and make his disease more manageable.