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What was supposed to be a 10 day vacation for Advocate Publishers Corinne and Howard Copelan turned into a three week stay in Israel before doctors gave their okay for the Mr. Copelan to fly home.
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Earlier this month, High Desert Advocate publisher Howard Copelan was admitted to an Israeli hospital for life saving emergency transfusion of hemoglobin.
Copelan was in Israel with wife Corinne visiting their daughter Anna who recently gave birth to their first grandchild.
“I thought I had the flu so I went to doctor for some antibiotics,” the publisher said. “Instead he sent me to the emergency room. My hemoglobin level was at 4.5, normal is 12-14 for adult men. Fatal low can be anything under 5.0”
While Copelan spent less than two days receiving some five units of hemoglobin it wasn’t until 10 days later that he was given permission to fly back home.
“My doctor told me that because of the low oxygen on the flight having a hemoglobin level under 7.0 could be fatal,” Copelan said. “When I pointed out that mine was probably much lower than that on the flight to Israel he said I shouldn’t push a miracle. Friday my test reported a level of close to 9.0 and he gave his okay to fly. While we enjoyed the extra time with our family we really had planned to skip just one edition, unfortunately circumstances forced us to skip three.”
Copelan is a sufferer of Hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia. HHT is a genetic disorder of the blood vessels, which affects approximately 1 in 5,000 people. It affects males and females from all racial and ethnic groups. The disorder is also sometimes referred to as Osler-Weber-Rendu (OWR) after several doctors who studied HHT about 100 years ago. In 1896 Dr. Rendu first described HHT as a hereditary disorder involving nosebleeds and characteristic red spots that was distinctly different from hemophilia.
Before Dr. Rendu’s work, doctors did not understand that individuals with what we now call HHT have abnormalities of their blood vessels, not a clotting problem in the blood itself. Drs. Weber and Osler reported on additional features of HHT in the early 1900s. More than one hundred years later, HHT is still often misdiagnosed in affected individuals and many doctors do not understand all of its manifestations.
“It really is an insidious problem,” Copelan explained. “My doctor explained that my daily nose bleeds were not dangerous one at a time but over a year or so taken all together I was losing more blood and hemoglobin than I replaced. I was bleeding to death in slow motion.”
While it is relatively widespread HHT often goes undetected or is misdiagnosed sometimes with fatal consequences. The easiest way to tell if one has HHT is a history of severe nose bleeds in the family.
According to survey’s HHT is the leading cause of fatal brain strokes in persons under 30. The major center for treating HHT is the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
