Stem cell harvest or "I have a garden hose in my neck!"

There´s an easy way to do things, there´s a hard way and then there´s the Anja way. Which is basically the hard way but with more glitter. :) 
I could´ve just gone to the DRK (German Red Cross), get two venous accesses into my arms for stem cell harvest and go home afterwards. All in one day, easy peasy. Instead my horrible veins decided that we missed hospital too much for that. And anyway, where´s the drama when using the arms? Boring! So it was back to hospital on Monday cause I needed a so-called Shaldon catheter for stem cell harvest.
But first we had to check my blood values- are there enough stem cells in my blood and are the values for Hb and thrombozytes good enough? Well good news- I was basically bursting with stem cells. I mean I have been given G-CSF shots worth a small car so that was to be expected (but still- yay! :)).

If we just sold the G-CSF shots on ebay we could´ve bought that car. Believe me we were tempted ;)

The other two values however... They sucked. My thrombos were down to 4k (just as a reminder- a healthy person has ~400k). I actually started to have little hemorrhages on my skin. So I really needed a transfusion (or two...) before they could place the catheter.
The Shaldon catheter is one veeeery long tube that´s being pushed through your jugular vein right to the heart atrium. The procedure is done under local anesthesia only. Which is quite unpleasant to say the least. The result looks like this:

Creepy, right?

The washing mashine

The next day at 8 am I was off to the DRK with my garden hose and my huge amount of stem cells. After a kinda forced breakfast I was connected with the "washing mashine" (that´s what the doc called the harvesting machine). I mentioned it somewhere earlier but for harvest my blood was pumped out of my body and through the washing mashine. In this machine is a centrifuge that separates the stem cells/leukocytes from the other blood parts. To prevent the blood from clogging in the mashine it´s mixed with sodium citrate which exchanges the calcium. Since the calcium poor blood was pumped back into my body I started to get a tingling in my lips and my face. So I had to suck calcium effervescent tablets. Well, I could´ve also drink them but I already needed to pee, like reeeeeally, so I tried to avoid any unnecessary liquid uptake. ;) I was very lucky cause after just two hours we already had harvested enough stem cells.

Back in hospital I got another thrombocytes transfusion so they could finally remove the catheter (it´s really difficult to sleep and move and basically do ANYTHING with this thing in your neck). Since apparently you have to be monitored for 24 hours after harvest I had to stay until the next day (which was so nice since I was in a four bed room with cranky old women). After receiving another erythrocytes concentrate because of my Hb value (was around 7) I was allowed to leave the following day.

Now somewhere in the freezers at my clinic are my stem cells waiting to be transplanted back into my body. They won´t need to wait long cause in about two weeks I will be back to get them. But until then I´m free and will savour every single day.