1. Driving to the hospital yesterday morning for high-dose chemo.
2. Just before I head down to ‘recovery’ for the central line to be put in. I think they should call it ‘discovery’ because they took an awful long time to find the way to my heart.
3. The tubes are in and I am just about to start the chemo, starting by sucking the ice for a while.
This is the first batch of chemicals I took on day one. We had just come back from the hospital and I had already taken a few counter-active pills before hand.
This is the ‘prelude to a harvest’. I am injecting a growth hormone that increases the production of stem cells and forces them into the bloodstream in a higher concentration. One of the side effects is bone pain, similar to growing pains. It felt like something was sqeezing my spine from the inside in a throbbing motion whenever I stood up or sat down. This footage contains sub-cutaneous needle use.
The Stem Cell Harvester. The blood comes out of one arm, goes into the centrifuge to be spun around. From what I understand, the red blood cells go into the bottom level, the plasma comes to the top, and the stem cells are located in the layer in between. This process is able to get about 1mL of the good juice per minute. Like liquid gold, but less pretty to look at.
These are two of the wonderful staff who looked after me for my radiotherapy. The music in the background was usually either Johnny Cash or Elvis. Very difficult for me to keep my hips still during Suspicious Minds.
This is the machine that administers the radiation. No one is allowed in the room except the patient while it is emitting the radiation. This particular footage shows the machine twisting onto its side to take a profile of my chest in X-ray. A few times a week they would take such an X-ray to monitor the progress of the therapy. The screen that you see unfolding is the receiving part of the digital X-ray.
We took this after we found out that no Myeloma was found in the rest of my body. Good news!
After the biopsy at Freo Hospital
Before the biopsy at Freo Hospital.