Well, yesterday was the first big day of the leukapheresis, or the harvesting of the stem cells which will later get returned to my body as I go through the High Dose chemo. From these pictures I am sure it is hard for most of you to tell the difference between which computer was used for this process and which was a prop on the original Star Trek series, they are both on the cutting edge of technology.In all seriousness, the machine they did have me hooked up to does look like it is 30 years old but it does what it is suppose to, who cares. The nurses actually said that the first one ever designed and used to do this procedure was in the room right next door and they still use it today. The process is painless and takes approximately 3 hours. It is basically a cycle where the machine extracts my blood from my body, takes the stem cells out, and replaces the blood back into my body. The machine is old school and has color-coded lines showing the nurses where all of the tubing needs to go. The goal for this process is to collect about 8 million stem cells, yesterday on my first day we collected about 3 million. We are off shortly to do the process again today.
Again, we are hoping that all of the stem cells can be collected this first go round and we can get right into the high dose portion of the treatment. If not, then we go back to the beginning and it will take approximately an additional three weeks.
It is nice that they provide you TVs to watch while you sit through this process, the TV I had even had a DVD player which was nice and Jamie had brought some of our DVDs so I watched "Stepbrothers" while getting the treatment. We stopped by a French Cafe for lunch, Le Pain Quotidien, which translates in English to, "Pain on your wallet for little food". They bring out a Roast beef sandwich open-faced and that was about it, they make REAL green tea, I am used to the Lipton's Green Tea that actually tastes good. Anyway, I guess you can say we are broadening our horizons.
One last thing before I gotta get going, Jamie and I were watching a show on Yellowstone National Park on the Discovery channel on Sunday night and during the commercials there was a commercial for Natural Light Beer. It blew my mind, I had never seen a commercial for the old reliable. Anyway, everyone have a good day and we are shooting for another 3-4 million stem cells today. Later.
You look way too happy in the picture above!!!! Hopefully you were able to catch Baseball Tonight and saw that Greinke threw another CG with 10k's and no runs lowering his ERA to 0.40. He is sick!!!! Old Blue is in town this week so I'm meeting up with him tonight at The Tavern downtown and we are going to the Rockies vs Giants game on Thursday afternoon. Hopefully they were able to get enough stem cells today so you can get started on the good stuff!!! Talk to you later.
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