He was officially diagnosed in 2006 with ITP when he was just 6 years old, after almost 2 years of showing symptoms of what we now know, were low platelets. In December of 2013 his diagnosis was changed to Evans Syndrome, after almost losing his life, and battling a month in the hospital.

In "English Terms" with ES, this basically means his immune system will kill off his red blood cells, white blood cells, and/or platelets. Sometimes it can be all three at one time, or just two, or one.

In October 2014 he was also diagnosed with an underlying immune deficiency called CVID. Which means its a disorder that impairs the immune system and you have low IG levels. People with CVID are highly susceptible to infections such as pneumonia and other illnesses.

There is no known reasoning at this time to why either of these occur and their is also no cure at this moment; we treat with medication, blood transfusions, and infusions when his blood counts are low.

Only 1 in every million people in the world will be affected with Evans Syndrome; and only 1 in 25,000 are affected with CVID, my child is one of them and this is our journey.

For a more detailed and in "English terms" wording, please refer to this post "What is Evans Syndrome?"

Thursday, November 13, 2014

11/13/14 Update

Jordan got his last Rituximab treatment yesterday, and once again it went very well. Took a little over 3 hours as it did last week, Jordan slept throughout his treatment, except the last hour.

Exciting news though, his platelets increased even more, I will list the past four weeks down below.

Next week we head to Chapel Hill to see Dr. Gold & Dr. Wu to go over everything and see what we are doing here on out. I know they talked about starting the wean off of steroids, which will be a slow process, so it will take months before he is completely off them. I am hoping we also talk about weaning him off of CellCept and all of the other medications that he is currently on.

Fingers crossed this means we are heading into remission status...at least for a min of a year. Thats our goal, anything over that would be even better of course.

Platelet Counts

10/22/14- 10,000 (Before the first dose of Rituximab)
10/29/14- 35,000 (Before the second dose of Rituximab)
11/5/14- 125,000 (Before the third dose of Rituximab)
11/12/14- 205,000 (Before his final dose of Rituximab)

205! Very exciting as Jordan has not had counts that high since right before he was diagnosed eight years ago! So we are very happy with the current results. Now we just wait and see if his platelet levels will hold off, as does his hemoglobin and his other blood cells.

Continued thoughts and prayers as always!



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