Day 0 (i): Homeward Bound

No not me, well not yet anyway, but my stem cells. This after all is what it's all been about. It was a long hard slog collecting them; at one point it seemed it wasn't going to happen. I've had six days of chemotherapy and am now in a very perilous position. The deep frozen contents of the drum that was wheeled onto the unit this afternoon are quite literally going to save my life. So it was something of an emotional moment to see them emerge in cloud of dry ice from the liquid nitrogen in which they've been kept at -120 degrees since November. From there it gets rather more prosaic as each bag was dunked into a container of body temperature water in order to thaw out. We managed to take quite a few photos.


The cells came out of the container swathed in bubble wrap which made a popping and cracking sound as they emerged.

Then it was the paperwork! It's rather important to make sure that the cells are being returned to the right person. Here you see Raj on the left who is in charge of the unit and the senior nurse on the right Susie who supervised the procedure. What a cheery scene!

Here's Susie dunking a bag of cells into the bath of warm water by the bed. It took about ten minutes per bag for them to defrost.

Finally the bag of cells were hoisted onto a drip and returned to me via a canula in my arm. Susie's looking all professional here whilst I'm looking bemused to say the least! What amazes me is that once back inside me after their chilly few weeks in the freezer the stem cells know exactly where to go and what to do to kick start my immune system and enable me to resume production of red blood cells and platelets which will shut down completely in the next day or so. So why are there going to be two day zeros? Well the cells are stored in a preservative which (like most things in here it seems) can make you sick. They don't like to give you too much in one go. I've got ten bags of cells (+preservative) so I got six today and another four tomorrow. And it's true, I do now smell of sweetcorn. Just ask Nik.

The other business of the day was to do with the picc line. A scan this morning revealed there was a clot in the vein and the docs decided it was too risky to leave it in place. So the line is now out and I'm on blood thinners until my platelets crash later in the week when I'll have no clotting ability anyway!



This gives you an idea of the mess my left arm's in right now. This is probably why I'm pulling a less than jolly face here. In fact with my sweetcorn odour you could say I'm the not so jolly green giant. Ho ho ho. More of the same tomorrow. For now to bed 'cos I'm exhausted and am feeling a little battered and bruised.