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 clinic while we went upstairs to our familiar chemo room. My guess is they're patients undergoing a different cancer-related procedure, or workers hitching a ride to the other clinic. In the chemo room the four of us waited a little bit before a doctor led Angela and Leonard to the apheresis room to begin the harvest. Ang was a little nervous, but I had full confidence the apheresis would go well as her family has a long history of successful harvests 🙂.
We were informed the apheresis would take a couple hours, so I wrote the February 14th blog post while my wife's blood was being harvested. While I was waiting for her, she was able to get a video of the process while it happened.
Once the apheresis was complete, we were escorted back to the van to go back to the home clinic. Beside the van we saw someone parked a beautiful old Porsche right outside the clinic doors like they owned the place. Turns out they did, as our driver said that car belongs to Dr. Ruiz himself. Thanks to the MS drug company corruption in developed countries like our own, there is clearly good money to be made in the international MS stem cell treatment market.
Once we returned back to the home clinic, we grabbed a small lunch and waited for a couple hours before we were scheduled to go back to the chemo clinic for chemotherapy round three. Once we arrived at the chemo clinic, the patients in our group started receiving texts with their actual stem cell counts. The amount of stem cells needed from each patient for the treatment to be successful is one million per kilogram of body weight. I cannot tell you how many Angela needed as the topic of a woman's weight is universally off limits, but she heavily exceeded the requirement with a grand total of 706 million stem cells. I'm sure Ang was just trying to make enough stem cells to share with the other patients, as that would align with her overly charitable personality. Another perk of Angela's extra 600 million stem cells is they may help her immune system regenerate faster once the treatment is complete.
After several more hours of crosswords and Pokemon battles, the third round of chemo was nearing completion. I looked over to Ang's medical grade La-Z-Boy and noticed she hadn't consumed her second bottle of red shit. For those who didn't read the February 6th blog post, red shit is Angela's term for the electrolytic beverages each patient is required to drink during their chemotherapy sessions. When I asked her about it, she slowly turned her head to face mine, then rose her finger to her lips, implying her unfinished red shit was to be kept a secret. I knew she hated the taste of these mandatory hospital Gatorades, but I was determined to be a good caregiver. In true Canadian fashion, I did not argue with Ang directly about her choice, but elected for a passive-aggressive response. I had Google compile a list of all the bad things which could happen to naughty chemotherapy patients who don't drink all their red shit. I then sent an image of this list to my wife sitting directly beside me, and waited in anticipation for her to view this image on her phone. Although she giggled at the image, she was still a slave to her rebellious tastebuds. Unsure of how to convince my wife to finish her red shit, I considered force feeding it down her throat, like a parent shoving a spoon of Dimetapp in their coughing child's mouth. We eventually settled on a compromise in which she would drink some of her personal electrolytes at the home clinic. Her resistance to the hospital Gatorade makes me want to try it for myself, to see if it truly tastes that bad.
A fun fact we learned from a caregiver about the HSCT chemotherapy is the last two rounds of chemotherapy are easier on the patient than the first two rounds since the body becomes accustomed to the drugs. This proved true after chemo round three as Angela had no nausea or tiredness once it was complete. After we were taken back to our home clinic, we ordered some supper to our room, Ang drank some personal electrolyte powder to hold up her end of our bargain, then we watched some Ted Lasso and went to bed.
Comments