My Rebirth

The literature likes to talk about this the day that you begin getting your stem cells as beeing a day of rebirth. They even go so far as to give you a Birth Day cupcake.the day started out with a trip down to a surgical suite to get a PIC line installed. Basically this is like a giant IV installed in your upper arm with a small diameter wire that goes all the way up to your heart. This is done with ultrasound to ensure that the PIC line follows the proper branches in the vain network to get to the heart. Of course I caused a bit of trouble here as my veins seemed to be rollers and hard to poke into.
The gurney trips down to the surgical suite for the PIC line was installed reminding me of those movies that you see of the trains winding their way through the markets in South America where sellers are removing their goods just a head of a train. It seems that this part of the hospital was built prior to nurses having computer stations inside the rooms, even though the building is relatively new. So each nurse has a portable computer table but that place out in the hall to enter their daily information. As we come down the hallway with the gurney there is insufficient room to get through with the computer table on either side. So there's a bit of a scramble to get out of the way for us to roll by.

And of course the operating room and my room right opposite ends of the hospital.

Then the doctors was also concerned about the condition of my lungs as a result of the fungal pneumonia earlier this year. So we had another dodge down through the computer tables to get to CIT scan location early in the afternoon.

 After my return they had set up the devices that look somewhat like hot dog warmers to thaw the blood and stem cells. Producing we move forward to injecting some of the stem cells into my system. I was surprised that this was being done by hand and not by some sophisticated machine. The explanation was that the human contact is quicker in the case of emergency or need to stop or speed up the infusion process.

There were six bags of blood product to infuse however they decided to do 2 yesterday and am looking to get four more today.

The reason for splitting it is related to a preservative that they put in blood which can potentially produce some severe allergic  reactions so they want to limit how much of that preservative gets in your body daily. To help fight any allergic reactions and did give me a large dose of Benadryl which pretty much puts you to sleep, enough so that I missed Eileen leaving last night and delayed this report till this AM. So far I'm still feeling well, This is an odd situation where you come into the hospital feeling fairly good and the goal is  make you sick and they try to cure you.

So no big issues yesterday other than of course it was a zero day. Still feeling pretty good and will see how things progress today. Thanks for all your thoughts really appreciate them.