Fall Harvest Miracle

Fall leaves, autumn smells, it’s time to harvest Karen’s cells!  I was part of a scientific miracle on Saturday.  I received a call Friday afternoon, after visiting the hospital that morning for labwork and another platelet transfusion, telling me that my numbers were good for the first collection and to return at 6:30 a.m. Saturday morning.  Another angel friend drove me at the crack of dawn to begin the process and stayed the entire 7 hours.

After drawing my blood to get information for them to prepare the machine, we played the waiting game.  Two hours later I went to the 9th floor, designated for kidney patients and stem cell harvesting.  I had a great tech who stayed with me the entire process and explained everything very clearly.  They used two of my ports to hook me to the machine, one for in and the other for out.  I had to lay flat on a bed for 4 hours, except when I got to sit to use a bed pan.  (Good thing!)

Kyle helped explain the process so I could share it in my blog.  It is actually called a peripheral blood stem cell collection.  A Phresis machine collected 230 ml of a combination of my white blood cells, stem cells, and plasma, over a period of 4 hours.  The machine separates the blood into different layers.  They take out the WBC layer and plasma, and the rest goes back into my body.  Then the cryo lab tests it, takes a sample, and it is sent out to another lab to be counted.  They add a medicine to the collection and slowly freeze it down.  After my chemo, it will be thawed and reinfused.  They saved my plasma for possible future use.

During the procedure I also get citrate, an anticoagulant, which binds with calcium in the bloodstream.  I had a calcium drip, tums, and milk to drink, to prevent a citrate reaction, but because I am a small body size, I experienced a reaction and needed to have additional calcium.  The reaction was a tingling through my body and small shaking as if I were chilled.  Kyle kept the situation under control, so it wasn’t too bad.  They needed a total of 2 million stem cells and told me I would get a call later to tell me if I needed to return on Monday for another collection.  I had met people who had been collected 3 times and one poor man had to do it 7 times.  They told me it was unusual to collect the amount needed the first time, so I expected to return on Mon. when Kathy would be with me to see the process.

However . . . . they called and told me they had collected 2.4 million and I was done!  I call that a miracle!  I came home with a small headache, but thinking about what my body had just been through, this was amazing.

It’s now Sunday morning and I feel great.  I have such praise and thankfulness to my Heavenly Father for helping me complete this important part of the process. This also means I can stop the daily shots, yahoo!  My chemo will be the end of the month and prior to that I will be having different tests, PetScan, CT scan, and Muga (heart scan).