Blood Transfusion and Fall Harvest

I went into Mayo yesterday for a blood transfusion to boost my red blood cell count which had fallen to a really low level after my last chemotherapy treatment. I was a little nervous about the whole thing since I was going to be having someone else's blood put into my body, but I was reassured that it had been double and triple checked by the lab and was perfectly safe. I have donated blood before but have never been the recipient and I now know for a fact that donating blood is an extremely important thing to do!!! The process was a pretty simple one, they basically just hooked up the bags of blood to my ash-split catheter and slowly dripped it into my body...

While I was having my transfusion they also ran labs to see where my white blood cell counts were at. I got the good news that the levels had finally bottomed out and were now on their way back up, this meant that my bone marrow harvest was going to be very soon! On Saturday the count was at 3.8 and on Sunday it had gone up to 8.5. In order for the harvest to take place my rates had to reach anything over 10 which the nurses felt would happen this morning. When we got the results in today, my numbers amazingly had jumped all the way to 76.5 and the so the harvest began!!! 

The harvest was a very easy process as well. My ash-split was this time hooked up to the large machine in the picture on the left. One tube of the ash-split allowed the blood to flow out of my body and into the machine where it was spun around and filtered. The stem-cells were then separated and placed into a bag while the red blood cells and platelets were returned to my body through the other tube in my ash-split. (They actually removed and replaced the equivalent of all of the blood in my body four times). It is the stem-cells that they want to keep because this is where the bone marrow that will later be put back into me during the transplant is located. According to the nurses that were helping me today, my harvest went extremely well. Attached to the machine there is a small chart with the different colors that the stem-cells can look like as they are filtered and put into the bag. If the coloring is too light or too dark they have to make adjustments to the machine and either speed it up or slow it down until it is corrected. Luckily my stem-cells came out perfect the entire four hours that I was hooked up to the machine and not one adjustment had to be made! 

As I was just finishing up this posting I received a phone call from my bone marrow transplant coordinator Chris and he informed me that during todays harvest they were able to get enough stem-cells for three transplants!  It normally takes about two to three days for them to collect enough for two transplants, which is their goal, and I was able to give them enough for three in one sitting!!! This means that I finally have a week long break before I have to return to the hospital, the first break in quite awhile!!! 

The picture below shows the blood being taken out of my body from the tube with the red clip and being returned through the tube with the blue clip...

This is a closer picture of the harvesting machine. It is a pretty amazing machine and whomever invented it was a real genius. It is able to run algorithms based on your body height and weight along with the labs results of your current blood counts and determine the exact rate at which it needs to filter your blood in order to get the stem-cells out in the best condition. You can also see my stem-cells filling the bag hanging on the right above the machine...