THE DEATH WATCH-TWENTY-THREE

Today turned out to be a very long day. I had to be at the hospital at 6:00AM for the installation of a temporary central line. Immediately after this was inserted into my neck I was wheeled into Dialysis for the procedure they refer to as “Phoresis”. What they are trying to do is get a background count on my platelets before the anti-body is introduced into my body to see if the anti-body can generate more platelets to fight the cancer cells. The machine they hooked me up to is like a dialysis machine in that it takes my blood out of my body and passes it through the machine before it returns it to me. The machine has a centrifuge which separates out the platelets from the whole blood and collects it for the trial so they can get an accurate count. In about a month’s time after I start getting the anti-body I will go through the same procedure again. From start to finish the process takes about three hours so the bottom line is, I didn’t get home until 2:00PM. Having not eaten or had any pain medicine since early morning, it was a very long day.