Day 49, Monday, March 18th, 2013

I got my first stem cell transplant today. The nurses said things like, "Happy Cell Day!" and they made me a card (it's really cute). 

A lot of people who go through this process treat this as a new birthday to be celebrated; I don't know how I feel about that. Certainly, it is a momentous occasion, a milestone. But... to me, this is a lot more like taking a car in that has a cracked engine block, and, upon inspection, saying the hell with it and swapping it out for a factory fresh engine. Yeah. This is "Happy sort-of new car day!" I'm still me, but I run much better than I used to. I still have the same creaks in the shocks and joints, and certainly all of the little bits of frame damage that I've picked up from the occasional bout of driving as Batman would. While we've got the car in the garage, though, I'm going to get some of the rust and body damage patched up.

We're all just big machines made of subgroups of millions of bags of little machines, built out of protein, from nucleic acid blueprints, on scaffolding assembled from calcium. That's life.

The nitty-and-or-gritty of the actual transplant was as follows:

- Two hours prior to the infusion, I was reconnected to hydration.

- A couple of techs came in with a warm water bath, to thaw the bags of frozen, preserved stem cells that were harvested from me earlier.

- My nurses arrived with all of the necessary medications and tools to prep me and transfer the cells.

- Twenty minutes (or so) prior to infusion, one of the techs popped one of the bags of stem cells into the bath to thaw. The bags were fairly small, not much bigger than one of those Capri Sun juice bags from way back when (do they still make those?).

- At the same time as the cells went into the bath to thaw, I got big syringes of hydrocortisone, Zofran (ondancetron), and Benadryl. I remember the syringe of Bendryl looking like it was about the same size as the others, but...folks I was basically hammered off of my ass for the duration of the transplant. Have you ever been really, really drunk? So drunk that all euphoric effects had passed, the physical room seemed to have decided to learn a new dance that everyone else was in on, and if something miraculous didn't happen, you knew that your next four-to-eight hours would be spent making bile offerings to the Porcelain Lord, begging forgiveness for your transgressions? That is what getting a giant syringe of Benadryl is like. Handily, the giant syringe of Zofran, it being a potent antinauseant, prevented me from calling the dinosaurs.

- When the cells were thawed, and the meds had had time to kick in, the first bag (of three) was administered. It was connected directly to my Hickman line and allowed to feed by gravity, with the flowrate controlled by a little sliding clamp.

- Getting the actual infusion feels like a toddler with a dirty diaper is sitting on your chest and squirming around a little. I'll get more into why the diaper is dirty later. You can also feel it in the front of your neck.

- Each actual bag took about ten minutes to infuse, and the dirty-toddler sensation increased with each one.

- The combination of having been given the entire world's supply of Benadryl and being infused with stem cells makes you....fidgety.

That was about it.

It was short, uncomfortable-but-not-painful, and somewhat anticlimactic. Of the four people involved, two were getting trained on the procedure; the other two were their supervisors. I did my usual "medical potato" routine (except that I was a drunk potato) and mom took probably a great deal more photographs than I remember her taking, since I was slightly out of my skull.

Now then, the reason I said the squirming toddler had a dirty diaper is because the stem cells were preserved in dimethyl sulfoxide, or DMSO. In fact, they were preserved in a lot of DMSO. For the chemically minded, DMSO is a polar, aprotic solvent, with myriad applications in biochemical and pharmaceutical research. In this case, it is used as a cryoprotectant, preventing damage to the stem cells during the freezing process. It's fascinating stuff, but the squirming, dirty diaper point is that at the levels that I was getting it, it strongly prompts the taste of garlic/oysters/creamed corn in most people. I definitely noticed an oystery-corny flavour and aroma.

Further, it will take approximately forty-eight hours for all of the DMSO to be pass through my system, primarily through my epidermal secretions.

Sweat. It comes out in my sweat. I will smell like creamed corn for two days.

I slept for a few hours afterwards, trying to kick my Benadryl habit.

What smells like carrots? Rabbit farts.