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.

G-CSF

Pads was still quite hunched up yesterday, but that's loosening up as the Hickman line heals. Until that happened there was only a stitch keeping the line in place, so even though it was literally a pain to get off, it would probably be a preferred outcome to the line coming out by accident.
We've found that Pads is unable to cope with talking about treatment until the time is right. That time came at 5.15 Sunday evening, and there followed a lot of questions about the coming week. It's the G-CSF injections and there are some (limited) options around having a needle every day or having a cannula which would stay in for a number of days, reducing the number of jabs. The only option Pads wants between these choices is the one with no pain. He starts to feel threatened and no-one can move their hand in his direction without him starting to panic, even if he's buried his eyes in the DS. But, with the numbing cream on his injection site, he hardly noticed the tiny canula going into his thigh. But the G-CSF goes in just under the skin and he really got upset with the stinging. He walked to and, more slowly, back from the hospital. His tummy's been quite upset today so further outings were not really advisable.
He's struggling too with the overwhelming speed of the stages of this treatment. There's no let-up compared to the previous regime, but it is a very virulent tumour and this is his chance to beat it. We're glad that cure is still a reasonable hope, but we know various people we who have and have not survived cancer. Whenever we go into the hospital we always meet people who are coping with all sorts of hard situations: one with a tumour growing around his spine that's paralysing him and another with a slow-growing tumour around the brain stem and his breathing stops occasionally. Another one like that has ADHD too, and then his tumour suddenly took off and needed chemo. We brain tumour cases are a hard category, apparently.
Somehow, in connecting up the feed, they failed to clamp it properly and the issue justified a change of sheets. But, amazingly, he seems to be quite bright this evening. More G-CSF at 9am tomorrow...