Today marks the beginning of a new phase in my Multiple Myeloma journey. Multiple Myeloma is a form of blood cancer that affects blood production in the bone marrow, most notably the right hip and a couple of vertebrae down my back.
I finished chemotherapy a couple of weeks ago — a process I more or less powered through with few negative effects. This next leg of the journey is designed to wipe out the remainder of the cancer and give me a spanking new immune system.
| When | What |
|---|---|
| 23–31 August | I’m receiving Grastofil injections to coax stem cells out of the bone marrow and into the bloodstream where they can be collected. In the old days they used to perform a bone marrow biopsy, but now they give Grastofil injections. These mobilize blood stem cells out of the bone marrow and into the bloodstream where they can be collected more easily. |
| 1–2 September | Once all my little stem cells are mobilized, I’ll be hooked up to a gizmo similar to a transfusion machine, which filters out stem cells from the blood where they can be put into cold storage (for up to seven years I’m told, so I can perform a reboot if I want and install a younger me). |
| 4–5 September | I’m also going to have a Hickman Line (a type of catheter) inserted into my chest to facilitate injections and IV insertions over the coming weeks. To insert the Hickman Line, doctors make an incision in my chest into which they insert a tube that makes its way down my jugular vein to “just above my heart”. I’m a little freaked out about this procedure, but I’ve been told it’s really no big deal. Still, the Hickman Line will protrude from my chest for a month, during which I must not accidently whack the tubes sticking out of my chest or open one of the little plastic shut valves and allow my “blood from gush out”. |
| 8 September | With all this gear in place, I’ll be ready to receive a super blast of chemo down the Hickman Line to destroy all stem cells — the good and the bad. I’m told this may also destroy all body hair so good-bye covid hairdo and that lovely lockdown moustache I’ve been working on. More importantly, zapping those stem cells performs a factory reset on my immune system, requiring extreme vigilance against viruses or infections. My childhood inoculations also get tossed so at some point — once my new immune has rebuilt itself a bit (say, to that of a three-month-year-old) — I’ll need to be re-inoculated for chicken pox, measles, and polio, and so forth. |
| 9 September | The day after the chemo blast, the doctors will transplant those preserved stem cells back into me. If all goes well, I’ll be good to go (less that all-important immune system) after a few weeks of recovery. |
Recently I listened to a Simon Sinek talk in which he described courage as something that requires a community (it’s not solely an individual’s responsibility). Sinek aims his talks primarily at business leaders, but what he said rings true for me when I think about how my sense of courage has increased each time I receive a call, a text, a prayer, or a delivery of cookies. Having a community cheering me on has helped me power through whatever pain and difficulty the treatments have presented. And for that, I’m deeply grateful.
