I have been very concerned about a young Masai woman on my service who presented with copious uncontrollable bleeding from her mouth and nose. She had a very low platelet count of 4,000 where normal is anywhere from 150,000 to 450,000. These are the blood cells that allow your blood to clot, so obviously we understood why she was bleeding so much. Unfortunately her red blood cells and white blood cells were extremely low as well. This is what we call "pancytopenia" and is very scary and can sometimes be due to cancer, a serious infection, or an autoimmune problem. To make matters worse the only way to replenish someone's platelets here in Kenya is to transfuse fresh warm blood straight from a donor before the platelets die. They don't have frozen platelets stored like we do in the states. So through a train of translation English-->Swahili-->Masai, we were able to get her blood, control the bleeding and work toward the diagnosis. Today I got to perform my first bone marrow biopsy ever, this is where the body makes blood cells. We all celebrated with the patient and her family when we got the results that she did not have cancer and in fact her bone marrow looked like it was in overdrive and on the way to recovery! According to the pathologist it looks like she must have ingested a toxin (herbal remedy) or had a virus causing an "aplastic anemia." We are curious about the herbal remedy theory as the patient's family described similar symptoms of other women in their tribe and other doc's here in Kijabe have as well. Everyone was so overjoyed. I was standing among a family of very tall lean Masai just ecstatic thanking me, praising God and telling me they were going to bring me a goat!
---Katy
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