Sorry I have not kept up with my blog for the past week. When you finally get through with the chemo there is a lot of mental relief that comes with that and I was just enjoying getting back to actually wanting to eat something. Now I can not stop eating. Also right before my stem cells were given back to me last Friday (12 Apr) my internet was not working properly. So I will give a little update on the stem cell process and if anyone has questions, feel free to ask because I am sure I will miss some details.
So Friday the 12th of April was set to be my new birthday. When people go through this process it is like being given another shot at a normal life so we wish each other happy birthday on this day. The morning was pretty relaxed for the most part. I believe I got a couple of bottles of IV that morning, but I do not remember. My wife and our friend Tammy that is about a week behind me in this process were hanging out a little bit.
Then it was time to prep the room for the procedure. I’d say this was about 11 am or so and all of the clutter had to be put away. My room was situated in a way that they could get the blood pressure machine on one side of my bed and they set up the other side to prep for the stem cells. I learned that once the stem cells arrived that the process had to start very quickly because we did not want to lose any through the warming up process.
Dr. F put an oxygen mask on my face and started to tell me that if I felt certain things to let him know right away. I said no problem. I could tell things were going on around me, but I just focused on what Dr. F was telling me and then all of a sudden fire, tightness, and trouble breathing hit me like a bus just came crashing through. I was thinking “Thanks doc for the warning!” I continued to focus on him telling me to breathe and watched him looking at the bp monitor because if that falls they will have to act immediately with meds. Then there was a little relief while they prepared the second set of cells. Remember, I had to go through two days of collection. Yippee! Then the bus returned for its second run over my body. Thank God this was just a little batch of cells. Then I was done. That process lasted about 10 mins or so. Then the recovery from the procedure started.
After the procedure was finished Dr. F said just to stay still for about 2 hours, but here is a bottle to pee in. LOL He had to check to see if the cells went through or something. I really did not remember why he needed that first pee, but he did. I was focusing on the room spinning so many different directions. I was laying down and I felt like I was going to fall off of the bed. I felt like that for about 30 mins. They told me I could take the oxygen mask off, but I wanted to keep in on for a while. I finally did after the room stopped going a million different directions.
This was a really insane experience. I told Tammy that when I was getting the cells back all the feelings and visuals were something I never experienced before in my life. My visual that I gave her was the scene from “Bruce Almighty” when Jim Carrey is coming back to life at the hospital and all of the brightness and people was kinda what went through my mind.
Well, that is the stem cell day for everyone. I will write about this isolation process in the next couple of days. As you can probably guess, isolation is just that and there is not much excitement at this point. Mahalo for tuning in. Hope you were entertained.