Run over by a turtle, or, the Stem Cell Stud!

I am reminded of the story about the snail that was stepped on by a turtle. When the police officer asked the snail how the accident occurred, he replied, "I can't tell you, officer--it all happened so fast!" For the past four weeks, Florence and I have been going through test after test, procedure after procedure, and it seemed that nothing we did was getting us closer to the ultimate goal. In fact, with the post-Cytoxan low I felt last week, it sometimes seemed that we were losing ground. Then, Sunday evening, we were run over by that proverbial turtle. I got a call from the lab about my CD-34 levels--that it is to say, the measure of the stem cells in my bloodstream. The goal was for the Neupogen injections to raise that level to 10 or higher. My score was a whopping 54. Feeling very manly indeed, I reported Monday morning for the first of five scheduled stem cell collection sessions. Watching blood flow out of your body into a machine, and not seeing it flow back for several minutes, was enough to rattle me. But flow back it did, although without the stem cells. That evening, the Bone Marrow Transplant Coordinator called me with the news that I continue to be one of those obnoxious Boomer overachievers: the goal was 8 million stem cells to be collected over five sessions, but I had bagged 10,240,000 in just one session! My dear sister-in-law, Amy Upjohn, promptly gave me a nickname that I kinda like: The Stem Cell Stud! Then, this morning, the staff at Mayo pulled out all of the stops, and scheduled the two key remaining procedures for this week: the melphalan chemo on Wednesday and Thursday, and the stem cell transplant itself on Friday. The melphalan will wipe out the myeloma, but will also wipe out all of my bone marrow. The transplanted stem cells will rebuild the marrow. However, the combined side effects from the chemo and the transplant with make for a couple of weeks of nasty and unavoidable side effects. All of this is daunting, but the great thing is that we are finally taking the decisive steps that will drive this disease into remission. That, dear friends, is worth a lot of suffering to achieve.