Successful harvest

Pads went meekly down to theatre in Bristol at about 8:30am. He'll be sore on both sides tomorrow as they tried without success to insert the line in the same side as the previous one: scar tissue got in the way. It's another sign of the pounding his body's taken, that and the fact that his stem-cells took so long to come up. Pads had another battle on his hands today with raw fear. It wasnt the inserting of the vascath that worried him. That was done under anaesthetic. Removing it was the problem. In my mind I can still see the last pipe being drawn out from his leg, jaw droppingly wondering how much more of it there was to come! This time it seems to have been even longer:

From 11am he was attached to a rather big, noisy lump of machine that'd been wheeled in. The harvest itself took about 5 hours.

At about 7pm we were told that the harvest was a success. We had worried that the optimum conditions for harvesting would fall on the weekend, but in fact it was timed to perfection so that the lab was very pleased with what they'd collected. With all the residual blood in the machine and various blood tests, he'll have a couple of units back before leaving Bristol.

Although this was good news, no more GCSF injections for a start, he grew more and more agitated and even aggressive. This wasn't helped by the alarm on one of the pumps he was plugged into sounding for about two hours. When the results of the harvest were confirmed and the time drew near for the vascath to come out, there was nothing for it but more Midazolam. He was quite spaced out when I spoke to him afterwards.

They hope to return to Cardiff before noon, with a slim chance of being at home by evening.