Monday morning, much of the same, low on blood again. I received another unit of blood.
My cough seems to continue to get worse everyday, they are still treating me with cough syrup, breathing treatment and an enhaler. My counts are moving in the right direction, as I have probably mentioned before, your counts have to pretty much bottom out before you are ready to harvest your stem cell.
Andrew left on Wednesday, Jeremy came to stay with me until Clay arrived on Thursday. The timing was just right, we received a notice that we would start harvesting first thing Thursday morning. Before this could happen some other things neeeded to take place, a new larger line needed to be put in, so it could harvest, the line that I have had in for several weeks just wouldn't be large enough for the harvest.
We started out Thursday morning with blood work and scheduled a time to get my line switched out. After that we were ready to get started with the harvest, this a non painful process. Things went very well with Thursday's harvest, when we got there Friday they explained to us that I had harvested 30 million stem cell, they asked us how excited we were about the numbers. As we learn more, I guess we should to be very excited about the numbers. I was only hooked up to the machine about an hour and a half on Thursday to get this 30 million. The goal is to get 20 million over a 4 day period if needed. Just for the protocol they hooked me up about 30 minutes on Friday, we didn't ever hear the numbers for this short time. I will have enough to do the double transplant, then if I have problems in years or months to come I will have enough stem cell frozen that we won't have to harvest again.
At this point the harvest was over, we were scheduled to see the Dr. in the afternoon and things moved quickly from there. We were told we could take a break from all the treatment, rest up, recover from all the chemo and just take it easy for a couple of weeks. We met with the nurse to get all my home medications lined up, get all my instrutions and schedule my line to be taken out for while I am at home. All these things fell into place late Friday afternoon, it was nice to get my line out, it had been a part of me for quite a while. I am pretty limited on what I can do, stooping, bending, lifting due to the line being in the vein in my neck. You just have to watch for bleeding and such for a few hours after it has been taken out. I am glad this was late in the day so we could keep an eye on it before we heading back to NWA.
Clay packed us up and we heading for home on Saturday morning. I wasn't much help in loading the car due to not being able to lift or stoop to pick up things. We arrived home early afternoon on Saturday, it was really good to be home.
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