pre-testing continues

(sophie again)

It almost feels like we just got back from our 3rd day at work 🙂

Alice just kicked her feet up – we just have one more meeting tomorrow, with the neurologist, but all the pre-testing is done.

We’ll need to wait for a week for all results to come through, and the next phase will be stem cell harvesting, beginning on September 21st.

The morning started with a chest x-ray and a CT scan of sinuses. They added this CT scan after one patient died a few years ago, due to an undetected sinus infection that spread into his brain. Once the immune system is knocked out, the body has no defense against this kind of infection which might otherwise seem irrelevant. So it is critical in this initial phase that they detect any potential source of problem.

For this reason, Alice had a dental appointment too – basically to detect any sign of infection. But luckily, our friend, and dentist Julia Hallisy had warned her of the importance of doing a full dental check-up before embarking on this procedure, and did so a month ago, leaving us with a copy of all the xrays for the dentist here, who just sent Alice on her way. It’s not something people necessarily think about, but when you’re bringing down your immune system to nothing, and rebuilding it over the following year, you really don’t want to have any dental issues.

The 3rd appointment today was in the Blood Center where the stem cell harvesting will take place. It was to discuss Alice’s health, but also to explain the procedure to her. As everyone else we have met here, they are kind and efficient.

They first checked Alice’s arms to see if the lines could be placed there – but this is actually very rare, as you would need to have several available big veins on each arm for this to happen – so they will either place the line in the neck (vascular catheter) or in the upper chest (tunnel catheter). Now this will all happen on October 1st – after the stimulation of stem cell release phase. Alice will then be hooked up to a machine which will essentially take blood out, keep the stem cells, and give her blood back. We actually were taken over to a patient who was hooked up to this machine – who explained it did not hurt at all. Alice will be hooked up to this machine for 3 to 6 hours. Basically the smaller your body is, the longer you need to stay hooked to it. In Alice’s case, they will want 2 to 5 million stem cells. So if she hasn’t reached that number at the end of the day, she’ll need to come back the next, but chances are one day will suffice. Also, they mentioned that if she has extra stem cells that weren’t used, those will be stored for another 5 years at the hospital.

Good thing is she’ll be able to eat & drink, and most importantly use internet 🙂

Tomorrow we just have the meeting with the neurologist, so it’ll be a half-day of work..