Day 4: A walk through.

I woke early this morning, 5:30am, couldn't sleep. Got up and turned on the laptop and headed for the bathroom to my plastic bottles for the final weigh in.
1.6 liters, Yay ! That's got to be a personal best, worthy of a Gold medal.
(Gee I live a pitiful existence! Finding personal satisfaction from urinating in bottles.
I'm starting to relate to Howard Hughes.)

Germany is ten hours behind New Zealand so I thought I'd see what was happening at work..


Oh No.. I have to stop and tell you dinner just arrived.. Spinach Soup, oh.. Salmon chunks on Pasta with a white wine sauce.. hmm , not sure on the desert.. aah rhubarb and berries with cream.

I guess it could have been worse... No goat cheese croutons in the soup tonight..

You are not going to believe this.. The spinach soup is delicious! It tastes a bit like pea soup only dare I say it.. better. Argh whats happening to me, they must be putting something in my food.. oh wait a minute.. now I'm really confused.. putting something in the food to make it taste good?!

What a cunning bunch these Germans are! THEY THINK OF EVERYTHING!!



..work, I fired up the webcam and took a lot to see how Kurt was doing holding the fort.

Not much happening there, Kurt tells me it's still quiet out there. Next week looks better though.
OK what else could I do at that time of day?

It turns out not a lot, so I showered, watched some TV and went to breakfast. On my return the nurse whose name I have not yet memorised came into my room pulling on a pair of latex gloves as she entered, and asked for my urine. I proudly pointed to the two almost full bottles on the shelf. She picked up the two empty ones and gave me a disapproving look. Surely, I thought to myself, she had to be taking the piss in more ways that one?

Shortly after that Dr Glonti popped into my room and dropped off a consent form for me to sign.
Something about Newcastle disease bird virus's and accepting the risks.. blah, blah.. I thought to myself, "What's the worse that could happen? hospitalised with a life threatening case of feather moult?"

Even so I thought I'd better go downstairs and talk to Christine, the English born office manager, and see if she could explain the bird thingy to me.

Turns out it's all part of the dendritic vaccine treatment, somehow it all got lost in the translation.
Feather moult only occurs in extremely rare occasions she told me. I signed the form and Dr G said he would call me in a few minutes to start Mono-Apheresis.

An hour goes by and finally Dr G phones and asks that I come downstairs.
Dr Glonti is Georgian, in his early 30's and speaks 4 languages. His uniform is casual, a white tee-shirt and blue jeans. His English is poor and he speaks very slowly as he searches for each word. His German is fluent but slower than his colleagues. When he speaks in Georgian he barely has time to breath, each sentence sounding like one continuous word. (I'm told he also speaks Russian, but begrudgedly.)

I locate him in a different room than the one from yesterday. As I enter I instantly recognise the equipment as being similar to, but a lot more modern than that found in the apheresis room at Wellington hospital. I lay on the bed and he prepares to insert two cannula lines into my needle shy arms. Years ago the veins in my arms would stand out like river deltas if I made a fist. These days after hundreds of blood tests, IV lines and chemotherapy they hide away deep beneath my skin.

Dr G Can't find a suitable vein in my left arm, just manages to find one in my right and calls in the assistance of Dr Kopic to locate one in my neck.
(You may remember the horrific time I had when a surgeon at Wgtn hospital attempted to install a hard line in my neck for stem cell harvesting two years ago.) The type of line they are installing is much smaller despite doing exactly the same job as the one fitted on that occasion.
Dr K asks me to take a deep breath and 'push' . I feel a sting and some discomfort but the line is in.

Thin clear plastic tubes are connected to the two cannulas, one in and one out. The tubes run to the apheresis machine. It has four pumps, these rotate and squeeze the tubes in a rolling motion to move the blood along without it ever coming into contact with any mechanical parts. The tubes and collection bags are all one big disposable sealed system. Blood is then centrifuged into it's components of plasma, monocytes etc. It is the monocytes that we are collecting, the rest is returned to me in a continuous cycle.

The entire blood volume in my body goes through the machine 10 times before the process is complete. I have to lay completely still as the line in my neck constantly comes into contact with the wall of the vein it's inserted into, causing it to block, like a vacuum cleaner does on a rug.
This sets off an alarm and Dr G constantly adjusts both the position of the lines and my neck in an attempt to regain a clear flow. The process took around 4 hours and the alarm went off more than a hundred times. Despite never losing his patience, Dr G expressed his frustration in all four of his spoken languages.

The pain for me was intense, not from the procedure, but from the pinched nerve in my neck that both ached at the shoulder and left my hand completely numb. Eventually my feet got cramp and my full bladder became extremely uncomfortable. I've been through it all before and ultimately you get through it, I just focused on getting back to my room and relaxing.

So that was day 4, Tomorrow I think I'll read my book on where Under-Pants come from. I need a day off.

Night all.