The Over Acheiver

To All:


As I said Tuesday Ret's been labeled the Over Achiever because of some of the things she's been able to do during this process. Well we found out, as with many things, there are goods and bads and being an over achiever has it goods and bads as well. I'll try to explain.


Think of your bones as a pipe and the marrow as the opening or the flow of that pipe. As with any pipe it can only handle much volume and it seems the Lil Over Achiever was trying to push too much through the pipe resulting in extreme pain. That pain is a result of the pressure on the pipe in fact so much that her pain was, as they say 10 on a scale of 10, she said it felt like having a baby. Well they had to put her on a morphine drip to control the pain before we could get her home. After that we had to give her Hydromorphone every three hours over the evening and through the night. Well we made it and shes doing just fine.


The upside of being an over achiever I think is what happened next.


As you know for Ret's transplant she is using her own stems cells...........duh Jack that's what you been saying all along.... sorry. Anyway for this process they try to capture 10 million cells, 5 million used for her original transplant and the other 5 million they put in a U-Store it for a possible future transplant if needed. The process, called Apheresis, usually takes anywhere from 2 to 4 days where you're hooked up to the Apheresis machine and somehow it separates your stem cells from platelets, plasma and whatever else, not much unlike dialysis. Well the Lil Over Achiever, remember the info above, decided she would do it in one day, not that she really had any control and kick off a meager 40.8 million cells!!!!!! We had two calls from the SCCA/Hutch this morning one from the Apheresis team and one from her nurse just flabbergasted! As you can imagine today was a great day, the biggest smiles I've seen on her in a long time. Also we went to the Hutch this morning had a blood draw then out the door we went. What a relief that was no all day stays doing this test that procedure or what ever and that made us both smile. Not that I didn't have a huge smile knowing she knocked the ball out of the park on her stem cell capture.


Well that's all for now.

Love,
Ret & Jack