So this is how you harvest a stem cell...

Well Andy and I started today with a 4:30 am wake up call to make it to Andy's 6:30 am appointment at Medical City Dallas for his Central Line placement. A pretty standard procedure although in addition to his metaport on his right side, the central line will be used to pump the stem cells from Andy's peripheral blood stream for harvest. Andy made it through the procedure without any events and before we knew it he was on the infusion floor getting hooked up for apherisis.


The apherisis machine resembles somehting similar to time machine from Back to the Future. The three chords coming out Andy's chest were to be hooked up to the machine so they could pump his blood out his body, spin it down to separate the stem cells from the plasma and RBC and place the RBC's back in his body. All in all pretty fascinating.  Andy had his fair share of nausea, flu like symptoms and headaches, but he is 32 and in great shape so his first collection was great!! What normally takes people 4-5 days to collect enough stem cells for transplant, Andy did in 1 DAY!!! What an overachiever! Our warrior had over 8 million stem cells harvested today. That gives them 6 million they plan to use for transplant and an extra 2 million for future use if needed.


So what this means for Andy is that we do NOT have to go back to the hospital Tuesday for collection. WHOOHOO. But this also means that the whole process could be shifted sooner. We are awaiting a call from the nurse tomorrow to see when and if our original schedule will be changed. Moral of the story today is BE FLEXIBLE!

Cheers!
Alex