Last Time?

Today I have to go to the hospital for various blood tests. Routine stuff, and if my blood looks all right, it'll probably be my last set of lab tests at the hospital. If my platelet count exceeds 50,000 (and it by all means should) they'll schedule me to have my central venous line removed, and then they'll hand me back to my regular oncologist for routine monitoring. But for all practical purposes, today marks the official end of the bone marrow transplant procedure.

It went really well. Not "really well considering all the things that could have gone wrong" but just plain old really well. I had no complications at all, and I can't even say that the five days of chemo leading up to the transplant were that bad. Oh, I was sick as a dog, but I've been sick as a dog because of chemo before and I can't say this time was any worse - it just lasted longer.

My stem cells implanted quickly, I grew white blood cells quickly, and all went well. The only real excitement was after one or another of the chemo treatments. My blood pressure went down to something like 90/50 (expected with that sort of chemo). I stood up to use the urinal and my blood pressure went down even more, and I passed out cold on my feet. I don't remember it at all, but I'm told I started to fall forward, caught myself on the IV stand, then fell sideways and hit my head on the wall on the way down. All I know is that suddenly I awakened lying backwards on the bed surrounded by an awful lot of people, most of them asking "Do you know where you are?"

But that was it for excitement. The rest of time was spent either getting chemo, getting over chemo, or waiting for my stem cells to implant. I don't mean to disparage the hospital - they really try to make the experience palatable - but being stuck in a hospital room for a couple of weeks really sucks. The hospital bed was probably the worst of the whole deal. The mattress had an impervious rubber cover, presumably for easy cleaning, and it seemed that no matter what I did, I was always covered with a cold clammy sweat because the mattress didn't breathe. Even at night with the blankets pulled up I was clammy and sweaty.

And that's bad because - and there's no really delicate way of putting this - chemo makes you smell. Your urine, sweat and presumably everything else take on a characteristic scent, presumably because of some chemical or another appearing in the sweat and urine. Spend a night on a rubber bed while exuding chemo smell and the first thing you want to do in the morning is change your shirt to try to get rid of that weird chemical chemo smell. Blech. The smell goes away after a few days, but for a while it's pretty unpleasant.

I suppose the $64,000 question is whether or not it worked. There's no way of knowing without a PET scan, but for now I'm confident that it did indeed work. Put another way, I have no reason to believe that it didn't work, which maybe isn't quite the same thing. But either way, I'm going to proceed with the expectation that it did work, and that includes going back to work Monday morning for the first time in months.