So – today's the first day of 4 days of lovely jabs, before heading into the London Clinic again on Monday for 3 days of trying to harvest some of my own stem cells. Which gives rise to the amusing sight of Hawksey pursuing me round the house each day with not just one, but two needles of stem-cell-growth-inducing-stuff. Have to take it out of the fridge an hour beforehand or it stings like stink. Which makes getting the second injection in an even trickier task – call me Pavlov or just Dog, I know what's coming after the first one! Last time half the juice got injected into his own finger, so we'll see which of us out-manouvres the other this time…
Reason is to stick enough stem cells on ice until I need them again – ie when this first Stem Cell Transplant (SCT) goes tits up and I have to make some choices about what to do next. Which will probably mean another SCT, or thinking again about the dodgy Donor transplant option. I have 1.42m cells nestling cosily in a freezer somewhere from the January harvest before my SCT but you need at least 2million (per X amount of blood, not quite sure how much, if Liz T is reading this and thinks 'that's not enough, you nana'). And these ones should be better quality than my first lot as there should be fewer mischievous Myeloma plasma cells in there and less pesky Paraprotein too than in Jan.
So – three lovely people are lined up to come and keep me company as I lie in state on a pikey open ward from 9am to 3pm each day, with the super stem cell sucking machine (try saying that quickly) doing its funky thang, while I desperately try not to need a pee. Just hope my veins don't play hide and seek as well as they did before – the collapsed ones were so elusive last time that I got a bruise that lasted 6 months (I kid you not) from a nurse stabbign away at my forearm, so quite keen to find nice easy entry (as slappers say outside Wetherspoons on a Saturday night…).
Bugger – go to leg it to second Turkish conf call of the day – no Delight there I suspect.
Laters peeps, Scotty x