If you’re like me, you probably never heard the term “apheresis” before, so a definition might be a good idea:
“Apheresis is the process of withdrawing blood, filtering something out of the blood, and then putting the filtered blood back into the body, using a cell-separating machine.”
In my case, the goal of apheresis was “collecting adequate numbers of peripheral blood stem cells for transplantation,” which I’m glad to report was successful.
A minimum of 3 million stem cells are required for the bone marrow transplant. It took two days, but they were able to “harvest” a total of 3.8 million from me.
I’m feeling a little tired and somewhat drained. Strange in a way, since all I did was sit there while the machine did the work. But it’s not that surprising really, considering the entire volume of my blood was removed and returned to my body four times on each of the two days.
Modern medicine really is quite amazing.