A weekend of injections and an explosion that wasn't

We continued with the the neupogen injections every morning over the weekend. The main side effect of this drug is achiness at the large bone joints. The reason for this is that the drug is stimulating the growth of bone marrow and it wants to get out!

On Monday it was a drive downtown to Rush to get an ejection of mozabil. This drug is intended to help mobilize that excess bone marrow into the bloodstream. Instructions for this drug include taking Imodium to help control side effects. I'll let you imagine what those side effects are. In fact the word explosive was used but luckily I didn't have personal experience with that.

Today was devoted to a process called apheresis which is the technical term for the extraction of stem cells. Blood is pumped out of the body and run through a centrifuge to extract the stem cells and is then returned your body. Here's a photo of me happily enjoying the process.

The device itself looks like something that Frankenstein might have invented. So after five hours on the machine I was delighted to learn that they were able to collect 1.4 million cells today.  The target is 4 million or so I know I will becoming more familiar with this device.

So Eileen says I should be telling you about how I feel about all of this. Somehow I had not expected that  I would be lucky enough to be able to complete this process in one day. So coming back for a second and possibly a third day is something I had prepared myself for it and it is not unusual I'm told.

I did spend the day doing some magazine reading and got familiar with the development history of the Boeing 727, as well as the features of the new Crossrail link in London but that's all another story for another time.

So tomorrow will be pretty much a repeat of today and hopefully will be able to collect a few more of those cells. We'll check in with you tomorrow to let you know how the process all went.