It's day 0, which means it's the first transplant day. According to all of the workers, it also makes it my birthday or my rebirthday as we rebirth these stem cells back into my marrow.
Happy Birthday to me! Happy Birthday to me! The nurses have written it on my board and say it to me as I pass them on walks in the hallways.
The process goes pretty well. It takes one guy from the U of U reaching in a liquid nitrogen container to pull out a case of stored cells. Each case then contains about five bags of frozen cells. He warms each bag of cells in a water bath (like an immersion circulator for all of you who have ever watched Iron Chef America) to unfreeze them as we're ready for them.
He then hands off each bag to a nurse who skillfully has to set up each bag to drip properly into my veins and makes sure that every last drop is flushed from those tiny bags.
I expected the color of the cells to look like an ordinary deep red blood color. Instead, they look pink, like the color of cherry gelatin powder. Interesting.
What's also interesting is the smell associated with the stored cells. They preserve them in DMSO, which smells like a cross between garlic and creamed corn. I can't smell it, but Dale can. And one nurse that we passed in the hall asked if I'd gotten stem cells today. When I replied in the affirmative, she said she knew because she could smell them. Weird!
The only other strange thing was that my blood pressure decided to drop off towards the end of the transplant--80/33. So they lowered the head of my bed, raised my feet, and started running more fluids through my line. It worked. About 30 minutes later, I felt back to normal.
So how many people does it take to do a stem cell transplant? Two for about three hours each. My nurse, my favorite nurse, didn't even get to eat lunch until after 2:30 and she's allergic to the DMSO, so she was really itching to get out of my room.
We'll repeat the whole process again on Saturday, and that will give my body over 9 million stem cells to work with and rebuild with.
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