Stem Cell Collection
2009-10-21
Me with the collection machine behind me
Well today is the first day of my stem cell collection. It's not difficult or painful but really boring. I am hooked into this machine that takes my blood out of one side of a catheter and then winds it through a lot of tubing on the machine. At one point on the machine the blood goes into a centrifuge where the blood is separated into 3 main parts: red blood cells, white cells, platelets and stem cells, and then Plasma. From there the machine diverts the middle part, the part with the stem cells, into a collection bag. The red cells and plasma are returned to my body from there. In all there is about half a unit of blood outside of my body at any given time. The process today requires that the machine see approximately 25 liters of blood in order to get the amount of stem cells required. This means that my entire blood system will be circulated four times plus a little in order to achieve the 25 liters needed today. The calculation for how many stem cells needed is based on body weight. In my case I need between five and ten million stem cells per kilogram of body weight. The math on that is that I need to donate somewhere between 488 million to 970 million stem cells. This already sounds pretty amazing but in order to get those stem cells, the bones have to be stimulated to produce so many that they actually leave the bone marrow and enter the blood stream. In order to stimulate production of stem cells I am give daily shots of a medicine called Nupogen. Each one of these shots costs about $1200 and I have been receiving them for seven days so far. The cost of those shots alone is one really great reason to have insurance by the way. With the amount of cells that my body is producing I should be able to complete my collection in two to three days. At first I was pretty bummed about the number of days that are needed but then my nurse told me that average is actually four to five and that once there was even a twelve day collection! Thank you again to everyone for all of your support and I will be updating more often now that things are starting to happen all in a row. -Nick