Friday, March 27, 2009

A good week!

Hello Everyone,
Well, it has been sort of a non-eventful week. I had my 12 hr chemo day on Monday and it went very well. I was in a room with Pete and a Nurse and one other patient and her friend. This patient is one week ahead of me and thus was harvesting her stem cells that day so it was interesting be in the room with her, speak to her about her experience and also watch the machine at work. She was a very calm lady working away on a quilt with her friend and the impression I had was that the stem cell process was not taxing.
The big machine that does the actual harvest reminds me of a Slurpie machine at the 7-11 - mainly because of the bags of different 'flavours' being displayed at the top: platelets = sprite, red blood= raspberry and stem cells = 5-alive (how fitting huh!?!)
Now I was told by her and her nurses that she had an absolutely amazing blood count of 79. This number seemed to impress everyone quite alot though at the time I did not have the heart to ask 79...what? But apparently that is the number for me to beat next week! (The nurses said that as long as I had a 2 they would be happy...)
We were also told during my 12 hr day that my CT scan showed really favourable results in my cancer/chemo to date; 'dramatic reductions' is what my transplant co-ordinator stated. The ideal would have been 'no evidence remaining of disease' but I will take this good news and run with it...
Other than that, the neupogen shots have started and so far Pete has not received any wallop to the head so that means he is doing a fine job giving me the shots. No bone pain yet - a little nauseous but I have great meds for that.
I'm looking forward to a nice week-end - good health and beautiful weather - what a nice mix!
Take care everyone and all the best,
Carey