Thursday, 13 April 2017

It starts...............

Here I am at Hammersmith Hospital…….

As we all know the NHS is significantly under resourced but I won’t hear a word against them.  Himself and I are settled into a hospital flat ahead of the first stage of my treatment tomorrow.  I was accepted for this treatment in November 2016 so it’s taken a while to get to this stage.  A three month washout of the magic juice, lumbar puncture and litres (well it felt like litres) of blood tests to ensure it’s all safe to proceed.  I met with the Haematology team last week so it’s all systems go.
HSCT is essentially a “reboot” of your immune system.  MS is where your immune system attacks your central nervous system, connections get confused and in some cases lost.  By setting the immune system back to zero it’s thought that MS can be halted a magic spell “MS – be gone”!.  The treatment will not undo damage but bodes well for the future and for me totally minimise the risk of the word that starts with “Q” and ends with “plegia”.

To reboot a system of course you need to turn it off and on again.  The process I will go through is explained here https://www.mstrust.org.uk/a-z/stem-cell-therapy#howitsgiven .
First day of chemo is tomorrow, the mobilisation stage is done as an outpatient (hence the hospital flat as the hospital is three hours from home, and that’s when the motorway gods are smiling).  I’ll then go home with injections to stimulate enough stem cells then if all goes well, they’ll be harvested in 10 days time.  Several weeks after that it will be an extended stay in hospital with more chemo and the stem cells transplanted back in.  Then it’s a waiting game for my immune system to recover.

The big risk is infection with such a compromised immune system, so bear with me if I don’t come to your parties.  Food is also an issue – I ate my last pate, and rare steak for a while.

I think I’m all prepared

·         boxed sets ü

·         fully loaded Kindle ü

·         new PJ wardrobeü

·         the best family ever ü

·         shortest haircut in my lifeü (I’ll be bald in weeks I’m told)

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