and, done

[digitaldiscipline]

Bone marrow donation complete. I am apparently a model patient as far as having a metric fuckton of free white blood cells and whatnot to harvest, good veins, and enough bedside sass to keep the nursing staff entertained.

It is, in a word, boring as fuck. You spend about six hours or so unable to do a goddamn thing because of the needles. The book pictured was only functioning as a small lap pillow, because I couldn't even hold it or turn pages.



there will be a 'cool details' followup to come, once i've eaten and slept. the thing that's most notable to me at the moment is that they basically drew off and returned about the equivalent of 4x the blood in my entire body over the course of the day (22.015 liters)

Comments

[ivy]

Man. You should have had someone come read to you! Tell the Be The Match people that that is a service they should provide. [grin]

[angldst.livejournal.com]

Should you be called upon to do something like this again, consider getting a nice, long audiobook downloaded to a phone or ipod or something? :)

-d

[shanmonster.livejournal.com]

Amazing! Was it a painful process?

[thebigpants.livejournal.com]

So awesome.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

CS offered to, or let me borrow her Kindle, on which she also had REDSHIRTS, but neither of us slept for shit the night before - the Hilton's beds were in an uncanny valley of comfort that neither of us could negotiate - and so we both mostly kind of sat and dozed uncomfortably when not making conversation. our original plan had been to stream season 4 of game of thrones, but the hospital's public use wifi was on the fritz.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

if you're bad with needles, you'll have a bad day, because the extraction and return lines are not the tiny little injection needles for the filgrastim, and you more or less have to remain immobile so that they don't get occluded by the wall of your vein and pause the process.

my main discomfort was having to sit in one place for so long - my hips got cranky despite the recliner. the tuna sandwich i got for lunch was almost entirely flavorless.

basically, it was a transcontinental flight with no bathroom and an IV hookup, but my own flight attendant.

also, i was popping two Tums every fifteen or twenty minutes for the first hour and a half or so as my body adjusted to the calcium depletion caused by the anticoagulants - the side effects of that are a tingling in the lips and fingers and a weird buzzing feeling along the thoracic vertebrae - and after that i was fine, just bored and stiff.

apparently, the run-up to the donation is fraught with a lot more potential discomfort than i experienced - i wouldn't rate anything i went through above a 3/10 - because when the marrow producing sites go into overdrive and get hypersaturated with WBCs and begin offloading them into the bloodstream, that can be painful, and some unlucky folks can suffer from an enlarged (or even ruptured) spleen when it tries to stockpile them.

[ivy]

If you can even doze in that setup, your sleep powers may outstrip mine. [grin]

[clevermanka.livejournal.com]

This is really interesting! Thank you for the description!

[laurenthemself]

Good on ya!

[etcet.livejournal.com]

not restfully, and not for long - i joked with the nurse that if i wanted to actually snooze, it would probably be best to secure my wrist and elbow to the arm of the chair so that i wouldn't move in my sleep and pinch off the vein.