Bleed Like Me

Success!

With much trepidation, Amy and I went to the hospital this morning.  There seemed to be an insurmountable number of hoops and lucky breaks we would need to complete harvest today.

A large catheter was placed in my internal jugular vein, and then my labs were drawn.  We had a tense 90 minutes waiting to see if my counts had increased enough to proceed with the stem cell harvest.

Yesterdays white blood cell count (WBC) of 1.0, which is way too low, had increased overnight to 5.9!  Another test, the CD34 test, confirmed that the harvest could proceed.  Whew!  One hurdle down.

I spent almost 4 hours on the machine which filters my blood and isolates the stem cells.  An estimate determined by my individual counts and goal (2 million cells) indicated that 15 liters of blood would need to be filtered to reach goal.  The harvest was stopped at that time, and we waited another 90 breathless minutes to see if we were successful.

For once, I outdid myself in the right spot!  I was able to pump out 5.2 million stem cells.

My catheter remains in place through tomorrow to help with threading the special tubing for my heart catheterization in the morning.  One more big hurdle to go...  and it looks very promising that I will be home tomorrow night.  It's hard to believe so many things fell into place today.  It was an exhausting, emotional, and successful day.