MAY-o. MAY-AY-AY-o.

Daylight come and me wan' go home.

I'm working with the 'original' Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minnesota, to schedule me with their team.

It appears that thrombocytopenia (declining platelet count) can BE the result of a drug-induced liver injury, but it would normally have resolved by now.  

It's also a known, but rare, side effect from Cymbalta.

But my laundry list of questions remains unanswered, and ... based on the research that I've pushed my visually-impaired self to do ... the questions are pretty critical.

There's a lot of information that says ... if this was a drug reaction, I might now be sensitized to OTHER drugs as a result.

A couple of the docs have told me that ... if you're labs come down ... when they're back to normal ... it's all over.

Not true.

Studies that follow people with a drug-induced liver injury show that the liver injury can often BE permanent, or even worsen over time, despite having stopped the offending med.

The worst cases were those who did NOT stop, or re-started, the offending medication.

So ... while the primary liver doc tells me I can start back on the meds (if I avoid NSAIDS) ... I absolutely and strongly disagree with him.

It looks like there ARE ways to do blood tests, and:

• know with virtual certainty which drug it was
• know with virtual certainty what other drugs could cause me problems
• know if there's a particular problem with the way MY body metabolizes drugs, and ... if there is ... while it would mean avoiding a whole bunch of different meds ... we could drastically reduce the likelihood of something like this happening again

We should also be able to figure out if there's some underlying immune thing (in addition to the IgG Subclass Deficiency that Mayo diagnosed in '07) that sent my body into a flurry of viral, fungal, and bacterial infections after this liver thing.

Mayo can whip through a guy like me in 5-7 +/- business days.  So ... maybe two weeks in a hotel, spending 8hrs/day playing lab rat ... and ... with luck, I'll have the whole story.

As I implied in that other blog post ... 

Hey, Man ... I GOTS to know :-)

Stay tuned.....