My dad passed away yesterday afternoon. I’m told it was very peaceful, which is all we could really hope for. My family’s doing pretty good and they’re hoping to hold off with services until we get home.
Today was really long. It started at 7:15 with blood work, then 8:00 growth factors. The growth factors I’ve been taking cause fatigue, restlessness at night, and aching bones, all of which I’ve had to some degree. So I’ve been a little tired. At 11:00 I started the procedure to have a catheter placed in my left chest. That took until 1:00, and I wasn’t supposed to eat or drink prior to the procedure, so I was a little hungry too. At 4:45 I was scheduled to get another growth factor injection. It was explained that the injections I’ve been getting since Friday are to make the stem cells grow, and the one I got this afternoon was to force those new stem cells out of the bone marrow into the blood stream. The thing they didn’t tell us was that the injection didn’t take place until 6:00, and then they had to watch me for 30 minutes to make sure there weren’t any side effects. All in all, a long day.
Tomorrow I start getting the stem cells harvested, a process called pheresis. They’ll hook my catheter tubes up to the apheresis machine; it’ll start taking my blood out, and the apheresis machine separates the stem cells from the rest of the blood. The stem cells are collected at the bottom of the collection canister, and the rest of the blood’s given back to me. The daily process can take anywhere from 3 to 6 hours and there’s a pre-determined amount of stem cells for each patient that their doctor wants collected. My doctor wants 5 million stem cells, so hopefully I’ll get the at least that amount tomorrow and can come home. We have to go to the office every night to be ready for our 6:00 injection, because we may not have the results of the collection prior to that. So even if I get the 5 million tomorrow, I still won’t come home until Wednesday.
I’m pretty tired tonight, so I’m going to watch some Monday Night Football and fall asleep, for awhile anyway!