There’s still more to share from our apheresis experience, but for now here’s a photo of us with our wonderful team.
Our apheresis team
Collection finished
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.
August 28 health update
Greetings from Sacramento!
We’ve been here for almost five full days and are finally starting to feel completely settled into our temporary home.
Our Wednesday arrival was fairly intense. We packed up the car, drove to Sacramento, unloaded the car, grabbed a quick lunch and then headed to the hospital for three separate appointments (lab work, COVID test, and a teaching appointment about the nitty gritty bone marrow transplant details).
It was a bit much.
But then we were up early Thursday morning to start with the injections (administered by Ramesha!) that stimulate the stem cells to grow faster, followed by a 7:00am appointment in vascular access to put a “tunneled catheter” into my upper chest, where it will remain for the next however many weeks.This catheter will be used for the stem cell collection as well as to draw blood and give me necessary IV infusions, hydrating fluids, etc. (I shared in more detail about that experience in this blog post.)
Friday was mostly recovery and putting things away, while Saturday was a supposedly quick trip to visit a friend who I hadn’t seen since before the pandemic; unfortunately we didn’t reckon on traffic, which made it into a much longer day than anticipated. Today we went for a walk, watched the Ananda Village Sunday service online, and did some grocery shopping — all blessedly low key activities.
However, tomorrow is the big stem cell collection day! We report to the apheresis unit at 8:00am and I’ll be on the machine for approximately 4-6 hours. It will be great if they can get enough stem cells that first day but if not, we’ll repeat the process on Tuesday and even Wednesday, as needed.
And that’s all there is to report so far. More soon…
Love from Sharon & Fabio
(aka Bhagavati & Ramesha)