- CD34 presence in your blood is a good indicator of how many stem cells will get harvested. For those of you interested in such things (that means you, Josh and Sarah!) you can follow the link. For the rest of us, this is a molecule that they look for when they sample my blood in the morning and gives a general indicator of how many stem cells will be in the white blood cells they collect. Yesterday we harvested 1.3 million stem cells. The goal for someone my size is 4-5 million so based on how things go today, I may be done or may have to come in tomorrow. I don't have my CD34 count back from this morning yet - I'll post a note when I have that.
- My WBCs are up from yesterday. Yesterday I was at 52.8, today I'm at 55.4 (normal is 4.5-11). So I've got a lot of WBCs being made which is a good thing.
- I'm really starting to dislike Mozobil. It's a drug that releases stem cells from your bone marrow but it's pretty nasty on your GI tract. I had a fairly unpleasant evening with cramps and such. Hopefully I won't have to take this again tonight. Anything to get a good stem cell harvesting but it would be nice to avoid having to go through that again.
- Neupogen - another drug I'm growing to dislike. It stimulates WBCs (hence my 8x normal amount of white blood cells) which is a good thing. But it also makes you feel like you have the flu. Hot flashes, achy, stuffy sinuses. Uggh. Or maybe I'm just going through male menopause?
- It's nice to have a job where your work location isn't all that important. Yesterday I had a pretty productive day - attended meetings, did a little coding, kept up with e-mail, etc. Ping times are < 60 ms so network access is pretty snappy.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Another day in the big chair
Morning, all! I'm back at PSL this morning for another 6 hours of fun getting my blood processed. Not much different from yesterday so to keep you interested, here are a few interesting tidbits:
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Looks another collection day similar to yesterday in terms of the # of stem cells they'll harvest. We'll make a final decision this afternoon but I suspect I'll be back here tomorrow for one more round. I'm feeling better now; neupogen and mozobil crankiness has gone away so sitting down here for another day doesn't seem too bad. And I'm enjoying some lively banter with the nurses - mostly about them just liking me for my bar code, which at this point is probably my most attractive feature :). The physician impressed on me that the entire goal is to get a happy and boring transplant process and the way to do that is to get a shit pot of stem cells. So that's pretty motivating to hang out and not get frustrated about the amount of time this is taking.
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