Day 0

Thought I'd give a re-cap of transplant day (to the best of my recollection anyway).  I had two different methods of removal for my stem cells, so they had to separate them out and give them back to me in two different periods.  I woke up that Saturday and made sure to have some breakfast (bad idea) and then at 10:00 they brought in this pretty cool looking machine that had 6 bags of my stem cells in one compartment (looked like they were in dry ice), and another compartment that held the warming bath for the bags of cells.  I also received a little bag of suckers with a Happy Birthday tag on them, lol.  Apparently when they are re-infusing the cells most people have a funny tickle in the back of their throat, and they've been told that the suckers can help.  Basically, one bag would be thawed, and when that bag was almost done infusing back into me they would get the next one ready to go.  I definitely felt the tickle, so I started on a sucker.... made it almost all the way though it before breakfast decided to make it's presence known again, lol.  And that was pretty much how my day went.  I had 6 bags done in the first session, and then they were going to give me a couple hours to rest before they finished.  I felt like hell, LOL.  I think I must have slept a little bit, because I don't really remember much besides talking to my dad a little bit and them coming back with the second batch.  The last 5 bags were much harder on me... most likely because of the preservative DMSO... I was on overload.  They were pumping everything they could get into me to help with nausea and vomiting, but all in all, I made it through!  The nurses seemed pretty surprised that I was as coherent as I was with the amount of ativan they had given me, LOL.  I pretty much just felt horrible and tried to go to sleep early.  Of course they also gave me Lasix to try to move the preservative though my body faster, in hopes that I would feel better.  And it's a good thing they warned me that when I did pee that I was expelling large quantities of dead red blood cells in my urine.  Good to know, would have freaked me the hell out if I hadn't been warned... bloody pee is not something I had first hand experience with, LOL.  Anyway, so now it's just a waiting game to see how long before my bone marrow starts to cooperate and repopulate my body with the good stuff.

I'm at day +2 now and not feeling to shabby.  I'm pretty tired but I'm still getting up and doing my laps like a good girl, LOL.  My appetite is pretty much non existent so I've been forcing myself to eat so I don't have to be fed through my IV.  My neutrophils are still about non existent and my platelets are down to around 13 as of this morning, so I won't be surprised if I need to have another transfusion done in the next day or two.  But I'm hanging in.  XO