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March 15, 2005

By Laurel | March 15, 2005

Sam and I just got back from The City of Hope Hospital (Northeast of LA) where we went for stem cell collection. It went very smoothly. He had surgery very early yesterday morning to put in the catheter, woke up like a bearcat from the anaesthesia as he usually does (he doesn’t like feeling disoriented), and after he got his bearings, they sent us to the donor room for collection. The donor room is a big room filled with a lot of beds and big, old fashioned looking machines with blood tubes winding in an out of different gears like a super long crazy straw. Sam was the only kid in the room but everyone was very nice and our nurse Terri, mother of four boys, gamely threw paper airplanes with us and helped us in our aim so we didn’t hit nearby patients. After about four and a half hours, we were finished for the day. Sam started with a white count of 91 (which is enormously high) and Terri said the color looked good and she thought we’d get a lot of cells. They had told us to plan for at least two whole days of collection. They need 5 million cells per something (kilo of body weight?) for the transplant and usually want twice that for back up. Sam gave, drum roll please,,, 68 million stem cells per whatever they needed in four an a half hours! We have six bags of stem cells which is awesome because they will come in very handy in case of relapse. The only catch is that we won’t know if the stem cells are clean (cancer free) for another four or five days. If they are, then we are done with collection. If not, then we have to go back and do it all again.
Dr. Boleton took out his catheter (which sucked but I won’t go into gory detail on that) at 6pm last night and we zoomed home. I was telling Sammy how brave he was and that he was an amazing little boy and I said, “Buddy you have no idea how amazing you are.” He answered, “Yes, I do mom, I’m _really_ amazing.”
We start our third round of chemo on Monday of next week. It’s Cisplatin which is extremely toxic and probably going to be a tough one. We have a CT and bone scan to complete this week (out patient) but otherwise are going to try and make the most of being home.
Mom

Topics: Progress Reports | Comments Off on March 15, 2005

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