Gearing up

This post is going to be concise with no attempt at poetry. It is late and tomorrow is a big day that kicks off a series of very big days.

Tomorrow we wake up early to go to the hospital and get our catheters put in to our subclavian vein. A relatively quick procedure. We then come home and have the rest of the day to rest and get ready.

Saturday we wake up early again and head back to the hospital for a process called apheresis. This is where they harvest all of the stem cells they have been working so hard to extract from our bone marrow. These will be stored for the next two days. This is a three hour process.

Then we are returned to the clinic where we are housed and do a five hour chemotherapy infusion.

Sunday we again wake up early and head back to the chemotherapy room for another five hour infusion session.

Monday we can wake up early and go back to the hospital to have our stem cells re-implanted into our body and our catheter removed.

At that point, we are at what is known “day zero” (also commonly known as our stem cell birthday) and enter the neutropenic phase of the treatment when we isolate while my body begins to rebuild its brand-new immune system.

I wanted to make sure to mark that today was actually pretty amazing. I woke up and for the first time in as long as I can remember fatigue wasn’t present. There are days when it is barely there and there are days when it is strongly there all day, but I can’t remember a day where it simply wasn’t there. And it wasn’t there today.

Also, my ever present spasticity was also almost entirely absent. My walking was smoother, my energy for doing physical activity felt consistent and it was just overall a pretty damn good day.

Another quick thing to note from today happened in the evening. I got up from watching a movie and it felt like my back went into an incredibly tense and painful spasm. I have never felt anything like it before. It felt like the muscles were rock hard and throbbing spasms were rolling up and down my back. When I described this to the physician here he said that is actually bone pain caused by the injections. It’s a good sign. He described my experience so thoroughly that it gave me incredible relief. Simple ibuprofen was able to take it away.

So, I’m feeling solid, even better than solid. In bed and ready to sleep my way into this next big push. Game on.