Harvester of Sorrow...

I awoke this morning to the dulcet tones of two orderlies telling me they'd be coming back to bring me to apheresis shortly. I had two small bowls of raisin bran to make sure all systems were good to go, and I had them hit me with some Ativan (anti-nausea so as to accommodate a whole lotta painkiller) and Dilaudid (said painkiller). By the way, I have lost between 20-25 pounds and hope to keep it off. If I can tighten the belly just a little bit I'll look pretty darn good, I think. Though my expectation levels have been reset on my hair based on responses to that picture -- although my darling wife says I look like the doctor guy from Lost, some other messages indicate these sweetly-deranged comments could be a side-effect of marriage. :) I guess I'm a guy who needs his hair. Which is fine -- I bargained time for it to return in my overall calendar, and in the meantime, it will make shaving easier.

Apheresis is a completely painless, if dull, process through which the cells are removed via the Quinton Catheter now in my neck, separated in a centrifuge and returned to the bloodstream minus the immature "stem cells" (those which are capable of forming any type of blood cell). These are set aside for a part of the procedure down the road.

Dr. ML at Cedars' Sinai -- he of the gloomy outlook -- had suggested one of the limiting factors in how long they can keep someone alive with MM is the fact that it gets more difficult to harvest cells from patients that have already donated. Generally it can take 3-4 m cells per sq meter of body surface (an odd measurement upon which I have ruminated elsewhere in this blog). Also, there is only so much room to store samples. Lastly, the use of drugs like Revlimid, which are preferable to Thalidomide for therapy, make it difficult for a body to properly secrete these stem cells.

I had a productive harvest yesterday. I was in the chair for about four hours, during which time we watched some Lost episodes. This morning, I was informed that my white counts were back up to 12.2 (huzzah!!! A robust immune system!!!) and that I yielded over 19 million stem cells yesterday!! An addition to designating me an "overachieving stem cell donor", this virtually guaranteed that I needed no more than one more day (today) in the apheresis chamber. After today's harvest, I should have between 25-30 mil stem cells which should be enough for at least 7 transplants, including the two I need during this current therapy. Plus they will store all of them for me. Not too shabby!! :)

I no longer need the shots in the stomach to stimulate the growth, so that's one less painful procedure to deal with. Now it is really just a matter of getting my back fixed -- which could be challenging as it's been hurting like crazy lately and I'm sure that two weeks of being in here, terrified of coughing and gasping desparately for air when I do, probably hasn't helped. We should find out when my vertebraeplasty is scheduled -- with luck, it will be done Monday and then I'll be out of the hospital on Tuesday.

Then we'll take some amount of bridging therapy (thalidomide, dexamethasone, or potentially velcade) and wait for my body to fully recover (appetite, strength, etc.) before the next onslaught of high-dose chemo. I'm ready.

And this time I'm taking some kind of anti-conspitation drug!!! :)