Transplantitis

I had my first stem cell transplant Tuesday. Monday I was given the dose of Melphalan that kills the bone marrow (and, hopefully, the cancer) and on Tuesday I got two bags of my old stem cells back. It was... It seems that everything I write about is an unpleasant or uncomfortable experience, and I guess it shouldn't surprise anyone that the stem cell transplant was uncomfortable either. But I must sound like a broken record.

They thaw the cells but they still go in very cold, more of an icy slush than anything else. You're probably familiar with the idea of brain-freeze, the discomfort you get in your head when you eat ice cream too fast. Imagine the same thing happening to your heart and lungs. The icy fluid goes into your heart, which then pumps it straight on into your lungs. For the eleven minutes it took for the stem cells to be injected, I felt like I was having a heart attack and that my lungs had stopped working altogether. It's uncomfortable, and it's also terrifying; for a while I was pretty sure I dying.

Fortunately the discomfort doesn't last long and within a few minutes I was back to more or less normal. But boy was it an intense eleven minutes. The DMSO also gave me garlic breath. I myself couldn't smell it, but everyone around me kept saying "Wow, that DMSO really does smell!" Great. I have cancer, I've been chemoed, and now I'm physically repulsive too! Or maybe I always was and the DMSO just sealed the deal.

In the wake of the transplant, they discovered that my central line had stopped working, so they brought me back into the hospital Wednesday on a semi-emergency basis to see what had gone wrong. They shot one x-ray and said "Egads! It's hosed!" Somehow the central line had recoiled and gotten seriously out of position, probably during the frantic coughing I was doing during the actual stem cell transplant (that's my theory, not theirs; they didn't offer a theory as to why the thing would have moved).

So I had to have a new central line installed. They ran a wire up the old one, then pulled the old one out and snaked the new one in on the wire. It involved a great deal of pushing, jerking, yanking and general hubbub - I felt like the recipient of some strange and extremely violent Scandinavian massage technique. I couldn't see anything, however. They covered me completely with a sheet of light blue paper, and when they wanted to talk to me, they had to lift up a flap by my right shoulder, like a cook lifting the foil on a turkey to see how it's doing. The only part of the doctor I ever saw was a pair of eyes peering in at me under the flap.

So today my shoulder and neck are pretty sore. The chemo itself isn't as bad as ESHAP, at least thus far, but I've pretty much lost the ability to keep any kind of solid food in my stomach. I can still drink, though; that's an improvement over ESHAP.