A couple of months ago I got a phone call from a nice lady who asked me if I remembered registering to be bone marrow donor. It turns out that I was a tentative match for a 26 year old woman with Hodgkin's lymphoma; would I be willing to get a blood test so they could see if we were a close enough match? Of course! And thus began my Stem Cell Donation Saga *grin*
First I had to go to the hospital and get some blood drawn. Some was to check if I was a close enough match for the recipient, and some was to check and make sure I didn't have any infectious diseases (cancer patients are already so messed up with the cancer and the meds that getting sick can be the last straw).
Weeks and weeks and weeks later I got a phone call telling me that I was indeed a match. It had been so long I thought we weren't a match and that was the last I was going to hear of it, but I guess not. So then I got reams of paperwork to fill out. It turns out there's an experimental study going on -- instead of jabbing a needle in my hip and sucking out bone marrow (incredibly painful!) they wanted to give me a shot every day for five days and then just draw some blood. Great!
I can't remember the order of all this, but I had a phone interview, I had to get a physical at my doctor's office (since it's too far to travel to one of their sites), and I ended up having to get more blood drawn (since it was too long from the first blood draw until my donation date).
Finally, I had to get shots every day for five days. They were pretty big -- 2mL in each arm :( My RN friend came over to my house to give me the first shot, since it was a Sunday. She also had to draw some blood since they wanted a baseline before giving me the shots. The next two shots I got from my doctor. Then I flew down to SF for my donation, and had the last two days of shots given by the UCSF Medical Center (they were running the study).
Sunday:
The shots hurt, but other than that I was ok. By the end of the day I had a headache.
Monday:
Headache time :( It was weird; normally I get a headache towards the front of my head (you know, like when you have a sinus infection) but this one was at the top/back of my skull :p
Tuesday:
My headache retreated somewhat but my back started to hurt. I've never had a back spasm before, but I'm pretty sure that's what these were. After work I finished recording lessons for my sub to play for my students. Note to self: however long the finished video is going to be, figure you're going to need at least 6 times that much time to edit and encode the video. There is nothing worse than being in a hurry and sitting by your computer for hours while it exports the video to the burning software, and then compresses it for burning. I didn't leave home till 9pm! I took my video to the classroom and popped it into the DVD player, just to make sure everything was ok. And then it didn't work. I contemplated violence, and then popped in the 2nd disc that I'd burned on a just-in-case whim. Whew -- it worked!!! So then I drove down to Eureka.
Wednesday:
Andrea drove my friend Rio and me to the airport. My head and back both hurt, and I was definitely low on energy (though staying up until midnight the last couple of nights wasn't helping!) We flew down to San Francisco and were picked up at the airport by a limo driver. Alas, he wasn't driving a limo when he picked us up *grin*. He dropped us off at the UCSF medical center, where they gave me my 4th set of shots and took more vitals. Then we were escorted across the street to the Acute Dialysis center. They had about five beds in a row, and then a little glass room in the corner -- my semi-private suite for the next day's procedure. There the nurses examined my veins, and concluded that they probably wouldn't need to install a shunt into my neck (ack!) Then they sent us on our merry and told us to be back by 6:30 the next morning. We wandered around a little bit -- our hotel was right on Fisherman's Wharf, so we checked out the cannery and Ghirardelli Square. Rio and I really liked the fountain :)
I didn't have much appetite for dinner that night, so we just ate in the hotel restaurant. It was a pretty hard night for me -- my hips had joined the pain party and I wasn't allowed to take ibuprofen or asprin. Tylenol didn't cut it -- I wished I'd taken the nurses up on the Vicoden they'd mentioned.
Thursday:
The big day! We got up *early* in order to have breakfast and get to the UCSF medical center by 6:30. I felt a little better (I'm always sickest & whiniest at night). I finally got to meet Susan, my official National Marrow Donor Program liaison.
I got my last set of shots and was given a pill to put under my tongue.
Then they sent me to the bathroom for one last pee. (Side note: while you're hooked up to the machine, you can't just get up and pee. So if you've "gotta go", you get to use a bedpan. Avoiding that was a big goal for me, but dehydration is a big no-no. So I drank two liters of water the day before, and then very little that day...)
Then the nurse stuck a needle inside one elbow, and a flexible tubey needle (catheter) in the other wrist.
Thank goodness my veins were up to snuff -- they had me scheduled at 8 to install a neck shunt if they couldn't get the blood flowing well enough without!
The tubes were hooked up to this very steam-punk machine that had spinny, clicky things. The blood came out from my elbow vein, got mixed with an anticoagulant and some other stuff, and then got spun around in a drum inside the machine.
The red cells were heavy and the plasma was light, and in between were the white cells and the stem cells, which they collected.
Then they returned the red cells and plasma to the catheter in my wrist. The hard work was all done -- I'd filled out my paperwork, gotten all my shots, showed up at the right place at the right time... Now all there was to do was relax. The pill they had me stick under my tongue kicked in and I mostly napped for the 5 hours it took to cycle 22 liters of blood through the machine.
At the end of the procedure, they had given all the blood back except for this little bag of stem cells (a few red blood cells get in there too, which is what causes the salmon color). They carefully packaged it up, and a courier collected it to deliver to my recipient. This is less than I give when I donate blood :)
After the procedure I felt fine (still headachey and my bones ached, but I didn't have any additional weirdness from the procedure). A doctor interviewed me and I was released from the hospital. On the way back to the hotel (actually, it was a cross-city detour, but whatever!) we asked the cabby to stop by Yoppi, a frozen yogurt shop :) Then we went back to the hotel and I crashed for a few hours.
That evening I was feeling well enough to ride a cable car to Union Square, where we had sushi :) We also stopped by a pub so I could have a half-pint of draft cider :)
We got all of our tourist goals accomplished in addition to the actual purpose of our trip, so it was a very successful journey :)
It's Saturday now and my back and hips are a little achy and I'm a little tired, but otherwise I feel fine. So just a couple of days later I'm almost fully recovered :)
My overall opinion: It was a big fat pain in the butt, with all of the paperwork and medicine and feeling like I had the flu for a week. It was also incredibly awesome -- I got an all-expenses-paid trip to San Francisco, not to mention the opportunity to help save somebody's life. The chances of being a match are very rare, so I may never come up on the list again, but if I did I would agree in a heartbeat :)
No comments:
Post a Comment