Blood Donation: Part Four

So what happened to me when I gave blood and then had my MGUS blood tests go out of wack. As we saw in the previous post: no plasma cells are usually in circulation. The only way to get a direct look at them is to do a bone marrow biopsy. But MGUS patients use markers in the blood to determine what is going on with those clonal cells. The clonal cells produce "excess junk" that shows up in our blood stream. From looking at the junk we can reverse engineer what is going on with the clonal cells. 

So it is my belief that my tests were thrown off by my having a reduction in the absolute value of the blood, but not necessarily the absolute value of the junk. The "junk" remained relatively stable... my blood volume did not. It is possible also that the absolute value of the junk changed slightly as well. 

The measurement of the M-protien is in grams per liter. So if your liters drop down... your measurement of protein per liter is going to go up. 1 liter = 2.11 pints. So losing a pint of blood means that you will be losing 1/2 a liter. Mine did hardly move, from .3 to .5 g/dl.

The measurement of light chains however is.. milligrams per liter so it would seem that this might have a larger absolute amount since the unit of measurement milligrams is smaller than grams. Losing 1/2 a liter of blood from the body may have had a slight effect.  My results seemed wrong since I am IGM-kappa, you would expect to see an increase in Kappa and a stable Lambda. Instead my Lambda went way down. That would seem to be wrong. Since this blood test it came up. 

Now of course I had these blood tests about six to eight weeks after the blood donation and frankly it is questionable as to whether, at that point, there would have been any real difference.  But the absolute minimum between blood donations is sixty days and that is right at the edge of when these tests were done.