Home.. Home at last! Day1

I stink! ...No seriously I do. It's a result of the preservative they use on the stem cells and it's not nice. Actually I can't smell it but everyone else tells me I smell like a chemical version of a cross between garlic and seafood.
Great! So I'm gonna spend the next few days impersonating a synthetic garlic prawn.

Yesterday was a pretty crappy day I have to say. It took about two hours to inject the stem cells back into my PICC line (BTW, PICC stands for Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter) in my arm. They sucked the cells out of their blood bags using twenty huge syringes and then connected each syringe to my line and reinjected it from there.

They also gave me a shot of an anti-emetic that I have reacted badly to in the past. It pretty much knocks me out. The result yesterday was that I wanted to sleep a lot, was incredibly grumpy and irritable. Poor Sarah took the brunt of it when she woke me coming to bed. Luckily I snapped out of it and aplogised for being such a pain before she had time to throttle me.

Today I'm feeling ok-ish, well as good as one can realistically feel the day after a stem cell transplant. I'm just a little off colour and have only a small amount of energy available. It's like running a toy on almost flat batteries.. you get just a few minutes of rather pitiful running before it grinds to a halt. So that's me, I just have to plan my energy output and stay in cruise mode. There's no need to spend days in bed or anything if I pace myself.

So far it's been 48 hours since I had the Melphalan and I have yet to develop any new symptoms such as a raging sore throat or stomach problems. I'm hoping my ice-cube sucking experiment has saved me from that. If that is the case then I will recommend to the BMT staff that they implement my "cryotherapy" ice-cube sucking regime for all patients under-going a transplant. The only thing they offered me originally was one ice-block, where as I sucked on ice for thirty minutes before and sixty minutes after the drug was administered.

I have an appointment tomorrow morning for a blood test and then probably daily testing for the next few weeks as my blood counts plummet to zero before recovering once the stem cells make new marrow. It would be so good if I could get through all this without serious complications.
I have been rigorously sticking to my regiment of mouth washes, honey water and soft food so I don't have a repeat of last month's neutropenic sepsis and end up in hospital again.

Ok, shall go and see what the day has to offer.