Hi
theres a few points so I'll try to address them one at a time (I hope you don't mind)
Should I be concerned about the number of blood draw my son currently has in a year and may his lifetime?? Scar tissue being created?
not terribly, although it will be more convenient to move over to finger stick measurements. They've been around some decades now and there is much written on them because there is so much at stake.
Myself I have used a finger stick measurement for the last 7 years and correlated from time to time with vein draws (less recently) and found that its normally an insignificant difference (say 0.2 ~ 0.3 INR units).
My 13 year old son had OHS and has a St Jude in the Aortic position. 6mg seems to keep it in the 2-3 INR target zone.
I'm sure that's hard work ... and that range is normal ... the dose is what the dose is and doesn't really matter what it is, only that the right INR is obtained.
He has his INR checked through blood draw about once every 4 ish weeks unless we forget a dose/adjust or it’s out of target range/adjust, they check sooner.
personally I would not be satisfied with that. There is no such thing as an INR that never drifts and so I'd always want to be aware of any drift. I recommend weekly testing and indeed weekly testing is the gold standard.
We have had the draw/stick side by side 3 times in a row and it did not correlate 2x.
I'm not entirely sure I understand this, would you try explaining it again more clearly. It would be good if you could write something like:
we had a draw on [date] and a finger stick [date], the draw was X and the fingerstick was Y
the closer these dates are together the more meaningful it is.
We were told when INR is above 2.5, it often shows totally wacky high INR on the finger stick/home monitor.
thats the usual nonsense I've heard stated at labs by the lovely ex-nurses who do the blood draws. As well meaning as they are they are about as trustworthy as any gossip heard at the hairdresser or barber shop.
We live really close to the hospital, so not a concern for driving, but has anyone had problems with blood draws long term?
I appreciate your input.
myself I moved away from the labs within 6 months of my surgery (2011) , not least because of the amazingly bullshit stuff they spouted and their incompetent handling of my INR. Since I took on the role of dose manager myself its been smooth.
I put this page together back in 2014 to assist fellow valvers with their self administration and to clear up some common misconceptions and misinformation.
http://cjeastwd.blogspot.com/2014/09/managing-my-inr.html
I think you should read that and feel free ask me any questions you may have about what you don't understand.
Next, please let me go back to the issue of the claims of errant readings (as this has been studied quite a lot. This study has a nice graph which charts the differences in INR values between Coagucheck and Blood Draw
Evaluation of the Accuracy and Precision of the CoaguChek® XS System
you can see that there is quite a reasonable correlation between the Innovin reagent and the Coaguchek.
There is a **** tone of stuff written on this. I recommend you begin to get familar with this
... We had one vein and finger side by side (to prove Ethan’s would correlate and finger was accurate) and the vein showed 2.9 and the finger showed something ridiculous like 7.2 - so they said the finger was not accurate and that happens sometimes with higher Vein draw INR.
wow that's amazing, does your son have any known blood disease? I've literally never seen that sort of issue.
Basically finger stick testing is in the main so reliable that entire countries (not the USA) are moving towards it because not only is it more cost effective but has outstandingly good patient outcomes.
I can't explain the result you saw, but as others have pointed out it it is so far outside the norm as to raise an eyebrow (maybe even be suspicious that the test was not done properly or perhaps even "arranged").
Nobody will call you silly here, so please if you have further questions, you just keep asking them.
Best Wishes
PS: there aren't many diabetics who would say that they want to go back to the 1970's and have vein blood draws ... nor any labs brave enough to suggest they do. Home testing with a CoaguChek XS (or simmilar) is quite sufficiently accurate