Problem getting value from a public function on another page

Question

Hello please forgive my question , I am fairly new to programming and have confused myself somewhat.

I have created a public function and am trying to echo out a row count on another page which passes the user name value to the function I know this is working because if I print the result in the function itself I get the desired result.

here is the code from my page passing the variable and where I am trying to echo out the result.. which is the number of posts, $xcount

<?php $rez=$crud->postcount($pc); ?>
                   
<div class="card mb-4">
<div class="card-header">Welcome <?php echo $_SESSION['user']?></div>
<div class="card-body">   
    <div>  
  
<form action="" method="post">
<input type="submit" name="submit" id="submit" class="button" value="log out"/>
</form>

<image src = "<?php echo $_SESSION['user_image']?>" style="max-width:100px; max-height:100px<br>">

<p><?php  echo 'Posts created: '.$xcount;?></p>
<p>Contenthere!</a></p>
</div>
</div>
</div>

$pc is defined already and is available in the function where if I print the the result it works. However the value of $xcount in the code above is not printed and if I hover above it in vscode it says unset. I know I must be doing something completely daft so please forgive me in advance.

Here is the code from my other page.

public function postcount($pc){

    
   $sql=("SELECT count(*) from `posts` WHERE `created_by` =:pc ");
   $res=$this->db->prepare($sql);
   $res->bindParam(':pc',$pc);
   $res->execute();
   $xcount=0;
   $xcount= $res->fetchColumn();
 print ' number of posts:' .$xcount;

return $res;

}