Oof, you don't go down to zero platelets without something gone seriously off the rails.
Seems like it got caught right in time, but wishing for the best in the follow-up.
This being said, a problem with blood tests is that a layperson won't know right off the bat if a value outside of the normal range is ok or a life-threatening issue.
I understand it might introduce a lot of complexity for labs and that there's some level of "big picture analysis" involved that will require some human intervention, but even just a color-coded line for WBC/RBC, hemoglobin and platelets could already go a long way, as OP's case demonstrates.
These have existed for decades, although it might not always be surfaced. My provider gives me the reference range with every blood test and a red line for abnormal so I can know immediately where to start looking.
It's complete enough, yes. I played it up until the "main quest" was done (building a TC machine).
It took approx. 20 hours and I loved it in a very similar way as the blog post author describes Nand2Tetris, so I'll have to look this one up too.
I was cleaning up some stuff on an old but still pretty important prod server and not paying enough attention on that day.
Turns out in retrospect that accidentally deleting ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the main user account was not a good idea.
As the panic was starting to sink in, I managed to find out that an unprivileged user account was still available for SSH login.
Once I got a hold of it, I then tried my hand at running several privilege escalation exploits... until one of them worked (what a relief) and I could finally restore proper SSH access on the main user account.
It was both a proud and a pretty embarrassing moment.
For comparison purposes, tuition fees in a French public engineering school were around 700€/$800 per year when I was there about a decade ago, and I wouldn't expect this to have changed much.
This is without considering students whose parents have low revenue, thus getting access to financial help from the government. This was my case. Technically, I was paid to go to University, with 3600€ per year for being one of the top students.
For more comparison, tuition feeds at my alma mater (a German university) were 500€ per year. Most of that was for the semester ticket, that allowed me to use public transit completely for free across the entire state (Saxony).
Or if you're on Linux (Debian/Ubuntu), switch to one of the default virtual terminals with Ctrl-Alt-F1 (and Ctrl-Alt-F7 to switch back to your X server console on my machine) to experience the delight of low latency keyboard-to-screen typing.
This being said, a problem with blood tests is that a layperson won't know right off the bat if a value outside of the normal range is ok or a life-threatening issue. I understand it might introduce a lot of complexity for labs and that there's some level of "big picture analysis" involved that will require some human intervention, but even just a color-coded line for WBC/RBC, hemoglobin and platelets could already go a long way, as OP's case demonstrates.