I know it’s a runaway proliferation of white blood cells, but I wanted to know why
they can’t just be harvested/filtered out, as if you were donating platelets?
Are the white blood cells non-functional?
I ask this because I just learned of the passing of a 9 year old relative of a family friend. Being a parent too stuff like this punches me in the stomach real hard, and I’m having trouble keeping the tears from flowing.
This illness just makes me want to scream.
Hell maybe this belongs in MPSIMS; mods do what is necessary.
It is a cancerous growth of the ‘parent’ cells that produce white blood cells, I believe in the bone marrow and/or lymph glands. The effect of the one marrow growth is, among other things, to crowd out the ‘parent cells’ for the red blood cells.
Beyond that, I don’t know a whole lot about the etiology, but I presume from the fact that it’s classed among the cancers, you can see that it’s not purely ‘having too many white blood cells’.
One of my closest friends in childhood had a younger brother who looked up to me as an older friend, and whom I grew fairly close too. He died of leukemia at 12 when I was in my teens. I can still remember him being weak and bloated the last time I saw him alive.
An earlier thread on this subject.