Hello & welcome!
Your story is similar to mine as well - I'm an active and healthy 52 year old mother to 4 kids who was diagnosed after a routine physical in February. In hindsight I had been having symptoms for a while (bruising, tiredness, blood "whooshing" in my ears), but they weren't serious enough that I thought I needed to get them checked out. In a way I'm lucky because my annual physical caught the low blood counts before they dipped into critical numbers.
I don't fit the criteria for SAA - my doctor calls me "borderline" (my platelets are hanging out in the 20s and my ANC is slowly dropping but still around 1.2) - but I am needing monthly RBC transfusions. So I was allowed to wait for treatment until my daughter's HS graduation on June 9th, and I'll be checking into the UPenn hospital for hATG + CSA + Promacta on June 12th. So depending on what your doctor recommends, we may be on parallel journeys!
Mostly I don't look or feel sick (although right now as I approach 4 weeks out from my last RBC transfusion I do start to flag a bit!), so this whole thing is still pretty surreal to me. One of my kids (the daughter graduating from HS actually
) has a pretty serious health condition (intractable focal epilepsy), and I just keep feeling like I'm not the one who's supposed to be sick! But I am very hopeful that I can beat this thing and be back to my usual energetic self by next year!
Best of luck to you and let's stay connected as we walk this path!