Hoosier

Even here, nobody knows what a “Hoosier” is, so we can all stop losing sleep over it.

After a couple of days here, I am slowly getting used to our sterile, corporate apartment suite. Lacking a garden and any hope of charm, it has a number of redeeming features: it is clean, functional, and close to the hospital. And it has free wi-fi.

My mother, father, and I flew in on Sunday, and began both moving in and making headway in terms of treatment. I went in to the hospital, my new home-away-from-home-away-from-home-away-from-home (where do I live?), to get the third of many Neupogen (stem cell growth factor) shots. I was pleasantly surprised that all of the nursing staff seemed already to know who I was, and were all ready for me the moment I walked in the door. It has now been three days, and this remains true. I have not yet waited a single second in a waiting room! This place seems extraordinarily well-organized, which helps me feel like coming all this way was a good decision.

I got my central line installed yesterday, so I am back to being bionic. The tubes enter my body just above my nipple and visibly snake up just under my skin, looping over the top of the clavicle and down into the subclavian vein, following it into the right atrium of my heart. I am still sore from the procedure, and haven’t yet figured out how I am going to take a shower without getting the whole business wet.

I spent most of today in the hospital, the first of many such days here. Today, they collected the stem cells which will reconstitute my immune system after the chemotherapy. I spent a fair amount of time grilling people about various aspects of the procedure (how the machine works, how many cells they are collecting, how they are stored, etc), and slept the rest of the time. I got a call from the head of the transplant unit in the evening, relaying the good news that they had collected just enough stem cells in today’s collection that I wouldn’t need to repeat the procedure tomorrow. While I was happy to hear that things were going better than planned, I was not comfortable with the numbers. I had been told by a number of people who are involved in stem cell transplants that it was important to have plenty of viable stem cells in order for things to turn out well, and I was concerned that merely having “sufficient” numbers of cells to transplant was running an unnecessary risk. While the transplant doctor insisted that he believed that we had collected enough cells, he said that there was no problem with me repeating the collection tomorrow if it allayed my concern, and that he would set it up. On the one hand I feel kind of presumptuous second-guessing what is probably the most highly qualified team in the world for this procedure, and on the other hand, I don’t want to mess around. I am playing for every fraction of a percentage point I can get here, and if people are willing to humor me, I see no reason not to err on the side of caution. My immune system has served me pretty well up until now, and I would like it back, please.