The Whirlwind Medical Days

For my own memory and for anyone else’s interest, I wanted to recount the four weekend monumental days that proceeded where I am now.  All of this is written in a somewhat fatigue and chemo haze, so again mostly clinical not so poetic.

Friday

We got in the van and went to the hospital to have our port put into our chest. It is a quick procedure where they put you under a mild sedative and you wake up with an apparatus attached to your chest from which they will harvest my stem cells, do the remaining two courses of chemo, and reinsert my stem cells back into my body. It was cold, quick, and efficient and we were back to our rooms by 2 PM. Other than the exhaustion of leaving the building and traveling, I’m glad that part was quick and over.

Saturday

We got back into a van and headed to a different clinic where we spent approximately 3.5 hours in a very uncomfortable recliner in a very brightly lit clinical room attached to an apheresis machine where they try to extract as many stem cells as they possibly can. I was incredibly physically uncomfortable and needed to fidget and move all the time but kept being told how important it was for me to stay still for the machine to work effectively.

I got through it, the job got done and they were able to harvest approximately 1.2 million stem cells. Among the different patients in our group, the lowest count was around 475,000. I don’t know if it bodes well to have more, but I’m guessing it likely does.

We then went back to the clinic, had lunch, and found our way back to the chemo room for the first of next two day course of chemo. Overall it was a very long day of recliner chairs and having things taken out of and put back into our bodies.

By the end of that day I was deeply exhausted.

Sunday

We woke up in the morning and went straight back to the chemo room for our final dose of chemotherapy. It felt incredible to cross that finish line, though also so depleted and full of all the chemical molecules doing their job. It’s hard to fathom how much medication is floating around in my body right now. So different from my usual way of being.

Luckily, I did not get cystitis again. However, the bladder was still impacted and started the process of having to go to the bathroom every 30 or so minutes. All day. All night.

Monday

Wake up and back in the van to the same clinic where we had the apheresis. This time it was to take those beautiful 1.2 million stem cells and put them back into my body. This time all four of us got to sit in a room together as our stem cells were dripped back through our port catheters. It took about 20 minutes and the doctor came in to remove our ports and we were done.

They had erected a banner to celebrate our stem cell birthdays and the head of the clinic, Dr. Ruiz, came in to shake our hands and say congratulations. It was a moment of relief and the beginning of the recovery.

This will likely be a two post today as I begin to document this next phase called neutropenia which will last until I am recovered enough to return home. Currently I am still deeply fatigued, all of my internal organs seem insulted, and I’m waiting for the frequency of peeing to subside and hopefully to get a good night sleep.