Angela's HSCT Journey

It has been five days since Angela received her stem cells and entered the neutropenic period of her HSCT treatment.  Just as a reminder, the neutropenic period is the timeframe in which Angela and the other patients are under strict quarantine to their apartments and have limited dietary options.  These restrictions are in place because the chemotherapy drugs in their bodies are obliterating all the white blood cells in her bloodstream.   During this period, Ang gets a Filgrastim shot every 24 hours and gets her blood sampled every 48 hours to check how many white blood cells remain in her bloodstream.  The friendly Mexican doctors advised us her white blood cell count needs to get near zero before her new immune system can start to develop.  The reason it works like this is because the newly injected stem cells just float around aimlessly in the bloodstream until they can find vacant niches in the bone marrow to call home.  Unfortunately, there are o...

On the morning of the 16th, Angela and the Group 3 squad of patients set out to the chemo clinic for their fourth and final round of chemotherapy.  As Angela slept in her medical-grade La-Z-Boy,  I went to the nearby break room and witnessed a British man struggling to use the communal k-pod coffee machine.  I felt empathy for the British man, especially with my own reputation for past coffee machine mishaps.  I had also used this machine three times before, once for each round of Angela's chemotherapy.  I imagine this machine causes grief for many a users as it is no standard issue k-pod coffee machine.   For starters, it's appearance is akin to a vertically standing metal donut, like the top-half of a CT scanner.  While placement of the k-pod is easy to anyone familiar with a Keurig machine, placement of the cup is another experience entirely.  The metal donut features a black open-topped box in its center hole where we are apparently suppo...

 Today was considered our "long day" according to the clinic staff because it involves both apheresis and chemotherapy.  Our day began early at 6:00 AM as a nurse knocked on our apartment door for a blood test.  The purpose of this blood test was to confirm Angela had enough stem cells in her blood to harvest today.  She passed this test with flying colours, but that comes as no surprise to me since her bones were aching from the overtime strain producing those stem cells.  The nurse soon advised Angela and an 83 year old New Yorker patient named Leonard were to be ready by 8:10 AM to go for apheresis.  Apheresis is just a fancy way to say stem cell harvest. When we got into the van, we were accompanied by Leonard and his caregiver as expected, but there were an additional two people in the van whom I've never seen before.  When we arrived at the Chemo/Apheresis clinic, those two extra people in the van just disappeared into the first floor of the clin...

 Yesterday Angela and I started our day off early with a field trip to Hospital Puebla to get her catheter placement.  This catheter gets put into her chest and is used for transferring her stem cells out of her body.  On the way to Hospital Puebla, we passed a large mall featuring a childhood relic from a bygone age.  I had to do a double take just to make sure my eyes weren't deceiving me as I was astonished at what laid before my eyes.  It was a Sears department store, alive and well.  It warmed my heart knowing the children of Puebla could very well still sift through the pages of a thick Sears Catalog Wishbook and circle all their Christmas wishes for mom and dad.  I know it's hard to believe, so I attached a photo below to prove the existence of this prehistoric retail conglomerate in the wild. Once we arrived at Hospital Puebla, we all admired the beauty of this grand medical facility.  It was glass all around like a Bank's head office, wit...

As Wednesday night approached, Angela began to feel great pain in her lower back and hips, so painful it made her cry.  While making Angela cry for emotional reasons is among the easiest tasks in the world,  I have never seen her cry over physical pain, so I imagine it was very painful.  The doctor and nurses advised us it is bone pain and it's a positive sign her bone marrow is working overtime to produce as many stem cells as possible for the harvest.  Thankfully they were able to give her some pills to alleviate the pain while her bone marrow does it's job.  The pain also travelled to her knees later yesterday, making stairs her worst enemy and the elevator her best friend. Thursday after breakfast and Ang's Filgrastim shot, one of the clinic staff members hosted an acrylic painting activity for the Group 3 patients and caregivers.  We were each given a small canvas on which to paint whatever we desired.  Angela challenged me with painting our dog, ...

Yesterday started off like all other days this week with the morning Filgrastim shot, breakfast, gym time, and puzzling.  However, what made it special from the other days is most of the patients in the clinic, including Angela, agreed to shave their heads on the rooftop patio together at 5:00pm.  They felt it would be fun to support each other through shaving their heads together.  As anyone remotely familiar with chemotherapy knows, the chemotherapy process involves the complete loss of hair from one's head.  For HSCT, that happens to occur soon after the fourth round of chemotherapy.  The idea behind the patients shaving it off ahead of time is to avoid the trauma of watching their hair fall off in sizeable chunks after that fourth round. The ceremonial shaving of the heads began with one of the caretakers bringing up a corded hair trimmer and setting up a haircut station along the wall of the rooftop patio near the one outlet available.  Mary, one of th...