Checking into the hospital

I’m in the hospital. I’m comfortable and relaxed. Sharlyne picked me up at the clinic today and brought me here along with snacks and a new pair of reading glasses. She is always prepared for everything, but not necessarily for anything. I invited her on a float trip with two other women one time and she suggested I might not know her very well.

Today was a completely different way of arriving at the hospital for me. I have a bag with pajamas and clean underwear, a book to read. I have some toiletries, my own kleenex (hospital kleenex should be donated to boy scouts for fire starting) and some extra crossword puzzles. Usually I am being ferried to the hospital by someone and one or the other of us is calling for clean underwear, the phone charger, shampoo and other stuff. I feel slightly more in control here. And I aim to fly under the radar and be low maintenance.

Things went smoothly at the clinic this morning and I got a few hugs for good luck from the nurses when I left. All the chemo has been dripped into me. So I am rinsing furiously with salt water and pushing the anti-nausea button if I so much as belch. No vomiting or mouth sores.

My computer has been acting strangely and I discovered a virus on it! I can’t imagine how that happened. I feel like my customer. I did have an experience like a customer this week. Often when someone calls me about a computer and I sit down with it to fix the problem, everything works fine. I call it the “Cathi Karma.” This week when I had the anti-nausea pump slung around my hips, I could not get it to work one morning. And when the nurse at the clinic tried, it worked fine. “Clinic Karma” I reckon.

I have an IV drip of the immune suppressant drug Prograf (or Tacrolimus.) The dose I’m getting for this transplant is higher than I received for the last transplant. And it’s being handled differently too. Tomorrow is a “rest day” meaning no chemo, then Monday the transplant. The actual transplant is really like a transfusion. It’s just a bag of special cells. Walt is having the most trouble since he is taking the Neupogen shots. He’s kind of squirelly. Besides a headache, he can’t focus for long, and he’s just bouncing off the walls.

On Monday he will be hooked up to the apheresis machine that will pump his blood out, run it through a centrifuge to extract the stem cells, then put the leftovers back in his other arm. They expect it to take 4 hours to get 500 cc’s or stem cells for me.

Being in the hospital is a good place for me right now. The focus is squarely on my recovery. I cannot do anything about what’s going on in the rest of my world so there’s no point in fretting about it. A physical shift is a good tool to get my head square.

Cathi