11/03/20

Hospitals! I’ve been trying to write something for the last hour and a half and every few minutes somebody comes in to take my temperature or swab my throat for MRSA or ask what I want for breakfast or take my temperature again in case it’s changed in the last three minutes... Finally got half an hour’s peace, I hope.

Cutting a long story short or I’ll never get to the end of this:
Stayed at the Paddington Travelodge last night because of early start this morning. Taxi from there to the London Oncology Centre, arrived on time. Had even more blood tests done, one of them to estimate how well the stem cells had migrated into my bloodstream. That took a couple of hours to come back OK.
So got plumbed in to the apheresis machine, left (blood out) arm not allowed to  move but right (blood back in) arm free to move.

Four hours of that, then got un-plumbed from the machine and another long wait for the lab to report whether we had got to the magic number of four million stem cells per kilogram of body mass. Unfortunately not - a mere one point six. So we have to do it all again tomorrow. I’ve had double shot of GCSF and a bit later will get a dose of Plerixafor and they are confident that will get the right result tomorrow. The snag is that a common side-effect of Plerixaflor is diarrhoea. Oh well, that’ll make a change from all the constipation of the last several months. I just hope that if it happens it stops before I get connected up to that machine again... Will have to ask the nurse who’s due at 23:00 to give it to me about that.