Tracey Parker shares her journey with immune thrombocytopenia (ITP), from an initial hospital stay and unanswered questions to the frustration of repeated tests and uncertainty. She reflects on her surprise of realizing her condition would become chronic.
Transcript
At first I was in the hospital for, I think, two days, and they wanted my platelets to be at a certain number. I believe it was 50,000 back then. So I felt a little isolated, but kind of not quite worried.
I had a lot of doctors coming in and out asking me lots of questions, and I kept insisting it was stress. And they said, “Well, that’s not really a thing. We can’t blame something on stress.”
We went through all the trying to figure out if I had been exposed to anything, if I had had any kind of illness that could have triggered this. We really didn’t know. They kept asking me questions about my drinking habits.
Do I drink a lot of tonic was a big question. I think I was asked that multiple times in the first couple of days and got really frustrated because I kept saying, “no, that’s not it.”
I was doing a lot of my own research, which is not always good on the internet, and you find some things that you’re thinking, “Oh, this is not good.” But I still was kind of under the impression that they were going to find something, whether it was in the hospital or the doctor’s office, and they were going to give it to me, and it was going to be resolved.
I just did not think this was going to be something that was going to be chronic with me. So I was really surprised when I got on that roller coaster of being chronic and not being able to find anything that worked for me.