Day One: The Beginning (At Last)

It's early Tuesday evening, and I've been at Northwestern Memorial Hospital here in Chicago since yesterday morning. After a week of tests, not to mention months of bureaucratic bullshit, I finally made it into the first rounds of the stem cell trial.

Stem cells are a minor, although integral, part of this regiment of treatment. In a few weeks, I'll sit in a chair connected to a machine while my stem cells are filtered from my blood. The crux of the treatment, though, lies in chemotherapy, and the systematic obliteration of my immune system. Unlike cancer patients, the chemotherapy will not completely annihilate my immune system, but merely decimate it. My stem cells will then be readmitted to my body and will totally rebuild--not reboot, which the forestalling interferon treatments do--this immune system. (Yes, that's three sentences consecutively that explicitly mention my immune system, but get used to it because, since MS is an autoimmune disease, I am quite certain that "immune system" will appear repeatedly.)

But that's still in the future. Yesterday, I checked into the hospital and was taken to my room, which has a separate room between it and the hallway, to minimize outside pathogens. Kids, obviously, aren't allowed--and this does not bother me one bit. All of the hospital personnel that enter have to wear a light-green gauze gown (alliteration!) over their usual scrubs or lab coats.

After one of the nurses inserted my IV line, I first received a saline drip. The problem with this, though, is that it makes me pee constantly, so at night I have to keep one of those handy, hand-held plastic urinals with a cap close by my bed. During the day, when I have visitors, I have to drag my portable IV tree, on wheels, to the bathroom, which is a pain in the ass because it involves unplugging it and gathering the strands of tubes that emanate from my arm and then wheeling the whole thing into the bathroom, where I still have to use the urinal because they want to watch my fluid output aka how much I piss.

Last night I received my first infusion of cytoxan, a form of chemotherapy that Ms. S. knows all too well. Along with that, I received a drip of Mesna, which helps to prevent bladder bleeding (and is also one letter inversion away from the pretentious high-IQ organization). This round of chemo was only my first, so I didn't have any of the typical unpleasant side effects.

Next week, though, we'll take it up a notch, and I can expect all of the expected side effects to kick in, like baldness and nausea and vomiting and what-have-you. I've said it before, but I need Ammo here to shave my head. She never actually has shaved it before, but she did give me quite a few haircuts in college, so I assume this would be a walk in the park.

Seriously, though, this saline drip makes me pee an abnormal amount, so you can guess where I'm headed right now. I have more, less soporific, non-medical anecdotes. But for now, I'm about to be discharged until next week. Since I have until then before we really jump into this thing, there's plenty of time for me to rant and rave about these & other trivialities.

R