Transplant - Day Zero

The magical bag. The red stuff is the stem cells

Now we start counting our days up from today, even though we have already been in the hospital 3 days. Transplant Day is considered to be day zero, his birthday as they call it.

This morning started earlier for Stevan than yesterday. I was able to get him up to eat and shower before the doctors made their rounds at 10am. Yeah, rough huh! Grace is our nurse again today and she gave him his pre-meds; Tylenol, Benadryl, and Hydrocortisone 30 minutes before the transplant. Within 5 minutes of receiving the Benadryl, he was out! He’s apparently very sensitive to it.

They had around 2.6 million cells in three bags. It took about 50 minutes to have all three thawed, verified and dripped through the line. I had been told that the preservative that the cells were in smelled like cream corn. It does. I actually couldn’t smell it at first, but an hour after transplant, I went to open the door to leave the room, I caught a whiff of the smell. It must be coming from Stevan’s pores in his skin. Even five hours later, the smell is even more potent in the room. I’m not sure I will be able to eat cream corn again.

Wearing his other "vacation" shirt, this is what
he's done most of the day.

Our pastor, Brother Mike showed up this afternoon. What a wonderful surprise! He couldn’t stay long, but it was nice to see a familiar face, a long way from home.

Anabel, from Physical Therapy, also came today to give him a list of exercises that he needs to do each day to keep his strength up. He didn’t look that interested in doing them. Matter of fact, this afternoon was the first time I had been able to get him up and out of the room to walk the hall in the unit, all of about 40 yards in length.

We are sitting tight, enjoying the lazy days and watching TV and movies all day… yeah hard time, I know. It’s just another day in the BMT Unit.

I have been working on fixing this site so that you can post comments on each blog. Not sure if I've got it fixed or not. I changed a few things, so let me know. Thanks Pat for pointing that out to me.