Tuesday - Apheresis Day

This morning Randy took another big step in this process. Apheresis is the process of drawing blood out through one of those ports Randy had installed yesterday and sending it to a special centrifuge that separates it into several parts. The stem cells are collected in a hanging bag and most of the rest is returned to the body via another port. Anticoagulants are added to the returning blood, which can cause loss of calcium so they add calcium with saline fluids.

The blood goes through a path that looks like a circuit board.

Courtney kept checking the color of the stem cell fluid because stem cells "live" in a certain color range so they adjust the centrifuge if needed. In this highly technical world of medine, they check it with a plastic utility flashlight.

At 11 she took a sample from stem cell bag for an estimate count. I'm not sure why they do that because, listening to the collective discussion about how to estimate, it's clear that this is not very reliable. Courtney even warned us that it's not reliable - the value probably lies in identifying very high or  low quantities. The estimate for Randy was 4 million.

Noonish Randy had a ham and cheese slice sandwich, although he wasn't very hungry; probably more about having something to do.

2:10 and the collecting part was over. They stripped the collection line to be sure they saved as much as possible, then sent the bag to be counted. While that was going on they set the machine to backflow to make sure all the extra blood in the line and centrifuge was returned to Randy, then changed the bandage over his incision. By the time they were done with that, the actual counting was done; 4,300,000. Dr Dean confirm that was enough so he does not have to have this process repeated tomorrow!!!