A productive day.

I started my day at the SCCA at 9:00 am with a blood test. It was followed by a platelet transfusion and a "G" shot.

Then came the surprise. I was told at 11:30 that my noon apheresis (harvest) had been cancelled. I went NUTS! WTF? So I went to my "team" and asked a few questions. Turned out that somebody knocked me off the list by accident, and that I was back on schedule. I'm glad I raised a little hell. What do passive patients do?

Anyway, apheresis happened as it was supposed to. It was followed by 2 units of blood (again), making something like 9 units of blood since this thing started.

I got finished at 7:00 pm this evening. Ten hours of being a patient patient. (Well, not always patient, but always a patient.)

So do you wanna hear the good news? The SCCA apparently has two different sizes of apheresis collections. One is obviously smaller than the other. They did the little one on me today so they could do another little one tomorrow. See, my hematocrit was 29 and they require a 30, so they were gonna fudge a little and do it in two sittings. They knew my late-day blood transfusions would get the number over 30.

Anyway, they wanted to do the apheresis in two parts because they need to collect at least 10 million stem cells and it usually takes two 'smalls' to get 10 million.

One side note: My doc suggested that the melphalan treatment I got before the "G" shots might reduce the number of stem cells to 6 million (maybe). She just wanted me to be prepared for only collecting enough cells for one auto transplant.

Well, the end of the day turned out to be quite good. Tests showed I produced (and they collected) 10.6 million cells from a 'small' apheresis.

Yes, that's a stunning result. No more apheresis. No more "G" injections. I have a blood test tomorrow at 9 am. It's the only thing on my schedule.

I'm relieved.