For the first two months after he was diagnosed with leukemia, former corrections officer Mike Mitchell doesn’t remember much.
He’d walked into the hospital on Oct. 8, 2014 with both bacterial and venereal pneumonia.
He was sick, and after some time, he wasn’t getting any better.
“If somebody had coughed, I’d have died,” he said.
So a doctor tested him for cancer. When the results came back, his life was never the same.
A healthy person’s platelet count would be around 150,000 to 450,000.
When he was admitted, Mitchell had 100 platelets.
Doctors discovered that he had a brain bleed, and gave him a 10 percent chance of living.
But his medical team didn’t give up on him.
“For the next four days, they gave me platelets ‘round the clock,” Mitchell said.
They gave him so many, in fact, that he “broke the bank” and the hospital was forced to reach out to the American Red Cross to save his life.
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