Normal!

We took the boys to Chapel Hill yesterday to see their hematologist. (It still blows my mind that they have their own, personal hematologist!) We enjoyed finally meeting him in person. He was really nice and really laid back. We will also hopefully never see him again, at least in a clinical setting. Yesterday both boys had neutrophil counts in the normal range! This means they are done with crazy interventions unless one of them gets sick and injured in the next couple of months. If they do, they will do an additional CBC (blood count) at that time. If the neutrophil count at that time is in the normal range, they will treat them like any other infants. After they get to be about 4 months old they will definitely be treated like other newborns unless there is a reason to suspect a problem.

For those of you interested in the cause of all this madness, in really non-scientific terms, there is something in Jeff's neutrophil that my body doesn't like. At some point his neutrophil passed into my body, most likely at the time of conception. My body decided his neutrophil was bad, bad, bad, and my body made antibodies to destroy his neutrophil circulating in my system. (And my body was smart enough to make antibodies that would only attack Jeff's neutrophil and not my own.) These antibodies passed across each boys' placenta (not an easy task for any substance). The boys continued to get the antibody the whole time they were inside and cookin'. Unlike in me where they antibodies differentiate what to attack, in them, they attack all neutrophil. Once the boys were born, they were no longer receiving the antibodies, but the antibodies still had to work their way out of their bodies.

The hematologist never told us exactly how rare this is, although none of the pediatricians or neonatolgists (NICU docs) in Wilmington had ever encountered newborns with this exact condition before. In fact, as far as anyone knew, the anti-neutrophil antibody test had never been ordered by our hospital before. One nurse in pediatrics, who had worked in hematology at a much larger hospital, put it in perspective. To the best of her knowledge, this happens in 1 in 100,000 births. In any given year, you can count the number of newborns born this way. And we got two of them!

Regardless of the odds for the prior odds, we are just ecstatic that the odds are now in our favor when it comes to having healthy, happy babies.