Aphereisis Day ONE and Day TWO and Day THREE

So today is Thursday, May 5th the day for the collection of my baby stem cells!! Wow...this day used to be so far away.....and now it's actually here! I was brought back into the section of the BMT unit where there are the traditional type hospital beds, separated by curtains and surrounded by this high tech/new age gadgets that are to collect my stem cells through one line in my chest and whatever is not needed will be returned to me through the other line in my chest. I'm imagining it's a very similar technique as dialysis for kidney patients. I'm still playing "catch up" with this journal as I came across some difficulty last week and haven't been able to get to writing till now. But I promise all gory details :) and some new photos to follow. So, not to say that the medical staff "lie"....mind you.... LOL but 99.9% of them said....."Oh, you're so little I'll bet you "collect" in one day". Which means they expected me to collect the amount of cells I would need for the entire transplant in one day. That means that I would collect anywhere between 2 and 3 Million cells in one day. Well, needless to say I spent 3 solid 6 -8 hour days collecting so it took me the entire 3 days! The first day I collected 800,000 cells and the 2nd day I collected 1.2 million cells and finally the 3rd day I was finally put over the edge that was acceptable! I finished collection on the afternoon of May 7th, but we were too beat to drive home from Tampa, so we spent the night at the apartment, and left for home on May 8th. We were home a grand total of Thur the 8th, Fri the 9th, Sat. the 10th and then left for Tampa again on Mother's Day Sunday the 12th.......to begin CHEMO DAYS on the 12th and 13th..........I promise to catch up soon. I just don't want to leave anything out!