My Amyloidosis

Hi, I’ve just completed the harvesting process on the optica machine and things went pretty much to plan.  We collected 1.4 million cells on the first day.  The hardest thing on the day seemed to be the access vein.  It took a couple of goes but soon we were cooking on gas.  It was really wierd watching your blood come and go but after 30 minutes or so I got use to it.  We did the harvest from 11.00 until 3.30pm on the first day.  The courier then collected the stem cells and plasma bags about 4.00 ish.

The results were then fired back to me via my Heamotologist consultant at around 8.00pm which confirmed a pretty good first collection of 1.4 million stem cells.  The target I was told was at least 2.0 million so back again the next day where we collected another 0.7 million between 10.00 and 2.30pm.

During the process I was told that my lips and fingers may well tingle (which indicate a lack of calcium) and to inform the team if this happened.  This is easily corrected through some calcium tablets (twice on day one and twice on day two) an I also had this in liquid form into my return vein so it hit the spot quicker.  The machine was paused for about 15 mintues whilst this was taking place to allow my system to get back on top.

At the end of each day I felt pretty sleepy and blood pressure reduced to about 82/50 but quick lie down and it was back up to 94/50.  I have quite low pressure anyway so I was told to stop taking my ramipril (used to protect my kidneys as I’m leaking protein due to the amyloid fibrils deposited in this area) on the second day as this lowers the pressure.  At the start of the second day my pressure was back up to a normal 102/55.

Can i just thank the team led by Debbie, who were great and we even had time to bluetooth a few ring tones and chat about speedway (one of the team was reading Sam Ermolenko’s autobiography and I was a big speedway fan during the 70’s and 80’s and still follow on Sky) during the harvesting as well as watch ‘Happy Gilmore’ which made me roar at times.  This may seem quite bizzare with everything that was going on but this really helped pass the time better.

The self-injections I had prior to the harvest were easily administered surprisingly.  I did this in my stomach similar to where I did my deltaparin (blood thining) injections.  The symptoms from this hormone were tiredness and a little lethargic but not too bad.

Anyway, I now have some of me in a bag for a rainy day which makes you feel a little more empowered to control this damn thing in the future if needed.

So back to the day job of work, family and practicing my golf technique (broke 90 recently) which is getting better but not fast enough!

keep it real, spk again soon

Phil

Filed under: Latest News on July 9th, 2009