Hammersmith Harvest

Well, I did promised to write a post Hammersmith update, so here it is.....better late than never.

We had a good meeting last Tuesday with the consultant who's going to be looking after me during my time up at the Hammersmith transplant unit. He's a little more black and white than my consultant at Kingston, a matter-of-fact and percentages person, but still very friendly and extremely well respected in the Haematology world. He ran through the potential outcomes of the treatment, but made it clear that this disease is different for everyone, and how an individual responds to the high dose therapy and transplant does not necessary translate to how long someone remains in remission. Despite the potential for an excellent response, like all other myeloma treatment, this process is not a cure and relapse almost always occurs. My job however is to keep focused, take one step at a time and remain as positive as I can throughout this next stage of the treatment.

So, what does the next stage of treatment look like. Well, my current and last cycle of Velcade takes me through until the end of November. Straight after my final injection I'll be up at Hammersmith for virology tests and heart scan to confirm I'm in a healthy position to start the stem cell mobilisation and collection process. Provided the results of these tests are positive, I'll be admitted to Hammersmith early December, so they can put in a central line (a catheter inserted into a large vein in your chest that I'll have in throughout the transplant process) and administer another chemotheraphy drug required to stimulate the production of stem cells. I'll be kept in overnight and hopefully check out the following day, with a bag full of G-CSF growth factor, for daily injections over the following 7 to 10 days. Once that course of injections is complete, the hope is that I will not only have understood what it's like being a teenager again, going through a growth spurt, but more importantly my stem cell production will have gone into overdrive. This being the case, the cells should start to 'spill' out into the bloodstream, and presuming the count is high enough, stem cell collection will start mid December. To do this I'll be hooked up to a apheresis machine, which effectively takes your blood, separates out the various cell components, draws off the stem cells, then returns what's left. The collection takes about four hours and will be repeated over a number of days until they've harvested enough cells for the transplant.

So that's the schedule for the stem cell collection, which takes us pretty much up to Christmas. I then get to spend Christmas and New Year recuperating, having my feverous brow regularly mopped by my good lady and getting to play with my numerous, very expensive Christmas presents....er....socks. We haven't yet been given the detailed plan for the actual transplant, but roughly speaking it looks like I'll be having the work up tests early in the new year, followed by the transplant mid January.

Anyway, hopefully that provides a bit more of an oversight into the whole high dose therapy and transplant process.Two more different chemotherapy treatments to go through, which at the moment is really quite a daunting prospect. That said, we're nearly at the end of the first stage of treatment, I've responded well, and I'm now one stage closer to remission.