This past week has been full of appointments. I had an EKG done, an x-ray on my chest, a physical, tested my Hickman catheter for the harvesting, signed consent papers & had my blood drawn everyday checking my blood counts & platelets. Normal healthy people have a white blood cell count of 5,000-10,000. This week my white blood cell count went down to about 2,000. If it had hit zero I would have had to go on antibiotics to keep from getting infections.
Tuesday night I ended up in bed for the evening with a horrible headache. This is a side affect from the neupogen shot that makes the white blood cells. I was given a prescription that did a pretty good job with the pain the rest of the week. I had my stem cells harvested this morning from 8:30-11:00 am. Their goal was to collect 5 million & they ended up with 4.89 million, which was good enough for me to not have to go back for a second day of harvesting. Whew. If my red cell count & platelets were too low I would have had to have transfusions during the harvesting, but everything went fine. I go in tomorrow morning to have my blood drawn again & get discharged. They need to check my blood the next few days to make sure everything is going back to normal. I’m going to find out if they’ll let me do the rest of the blood draws in Mt. Vernon, so we can go home tomorrow.
The Seattle Cancer Care Alliance (SCCA) had a great bunch of people to work with. That place is absolutely wonderful. Everything is so easy to figure out there & runs so smoothly. The apartment we stayed at in Northgate also worked out great for us. Most of the time it took us about 15 minutes to get to the SCCA. My next step is to get a hold of Group Health to find out what’s going to happen next.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment