“Aaron, you look like a different person today!”
“I feel like a different person,” I answered.
The PA’s face was a mix of wonder and astonishment as she gazed at me through her thin-rimmed glasses. Her lips broke into a wide smile.
“What happened?” she asked.
“I dunno,” I said with a shrug. “I did what you guys said to do. I rested into the evening, took some Tylenol to bring the fever down enough to get my appetite back, ate dinner, kept drinking Gatorade and went to sleep. Then, this morning, I woke up covered in sweat.”
“You broke your fever,” she said, shaking her head from side to side as she kept trying to comprehend what I was telling her. The smile never left her face.
I shrugged again. “I guess so.”
She gave me a quick once-over and took my vitals to confirm that the fever had broken. She called in the collection coordinator from the hospital and said that I was cleared for the procedure. She checked my veins, as well, and gave me the best news of the day: I was going to be able to donate without needing a central line.
T arrived shortly after and the coordinator came to lead us to the apheresis lounge. The long, rectangular room was clearly a medical space: one wall was lined with cabinets of various supplies and the air was filled with the beeps, hums and whirs of the different equipment being used. Still, despite the purposes and conditions of the patients there – the middle-aged man next to me, for instance, was receiving treatment and counseling for cancer – the title of “lounge” wasn’t exactly inaccurate; the row of thick leather1 recliners reserved for patients wouldn’t have looked out of place in most man-caves.
I sat down in the chair and positioned myself as comfortably as I could while T and the coordinator spoke in muted tones against the far wall. I asked a question about getting the Filgrastim shots again before the collection, somehow thinking that the staff had overlooked that step. The coordinator smiled back and said that they had not forgotten.
“Aaron, the plan is to not tell you anything that’s coming until we have to. We don’t want a repeat of the last few times you were here.”
“Got it,” I said with a grin. “I’ll just sit and keep my mouth shut until someone tells me to do something.”
Shortly afterward, one of the nurses, a short Asian woman who was much stronger than I would have expected, came over and gave me the fastest shots I have ever received. They were so quick, in fact, that she said she was finished before I realized that she had started. Then the other nurse, a tall African man with the gentlest of hands and the sweetest of bass-toned voices, checked my veins again and told me we were going to get started.
“We gonna make liars out of dem today, yeah?” he asked me with a wink. “Dey think you weak but we gonna show dem otherwise, right?”
I chuckled a bit.
“Let’s do it.”
I leaned my head back and closed my eyes. I felt the pinch of the needle in my left hand and kept my breathing under control as the catheter was put in place to receive the blood after it had been run through the apheresis machine. I began singing to myself softly when the nurses inserted the needle into my right forearm; the second pinch was harder to ignore but, just as before, I was surprised mere moments later when the nurses told me they were ready to start.
The machine next to me began rumbling as the centrifuge inside began spinning faster and faster to prepare to separate my blood from the abundance of stem cells I had been producing over the last few days. I thought I saw something dark creeping through the small tube running over my stomach but forced myself not to look. Perhaps a minute later, I felt a warm sensation in my left hand as some of the liquid from the machine entered through the catheter. This time I looked, just in time to see the other tube turn pink briefly, followed by a deep red as my blood made its way back into my body.
“Everything looks good,” the Asian nurse told me. “Now get comfortable.”
I wouldn’t say that the hours flew by but the time definitely passed more quickly than I expected it to. I listened to some podcasts, T helped me eat and we talked at different points about the procedure and our family. We chatted with the nurses and the coordinator about next steps for me and for my recipient.
Just under six hours later, the machine started beeping happily, declaring that it had finished filtering all of my blood. The African nurse came back to reset the machine and remove the needles from my arms. I leaned my head back and closed my eyes again, this time letting the man’s dulcet tones distract me from the sensation of metal leaving my skin.
“It’s a good thing you weren’t looking,” T told me when he was finished. “That was a big needle in your arm.”
I smirked.
“That’s why I wasn’t looking.”
Then T glanced up and her eyes widened with surprise.
“Hey, the stem cells are gone!”
I followed her gaze to see for myself. Sure enough, the hook above the apheresis machine that held the IV bag full of reddish orange stem cells2 was bare. Within minutes of the machine finishing the collection – probably while my eyes were closed – someone had come and whisked the cells away to bring them to the airport for transport to my recipient.
We kept talking with the coordinator for a few more minutes as we gathered our belongings. She congratulated me for making it through the procedure as smoothly as I could have and thanked me for sticking with it through the fainting, the shots and the fever. The PA came back in, seemingly still in a state of shock that I had actually pulled through, and made similar comments. The coordinator told me that I would be hearing from my Be The Match representative for follow ups and we said our goodbyes.
As we walked out of the hospital to meet the car service to go home, T turned to me and asked if I was proud of myself.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m just glad that things ended up working out.”
“So what do you think?” she asked with a raised eyebrow. “Would you do it again?”
“Now that I know I can do it without the central line? Absolutely.”
This is the final part of the series documenting my experiences donating stem cells through Be The Match. If you missed them, you can also read the other installments in the series. Please also visit Be The Match to find out more about their mission, their program and the people they have helped. I hope you’ll consider joining the Be The Match Registry so that you can potentially help save someone’s life.
Just in case you were wondering, I haven’t partnered with Be The Match in any official capacity for this post, aside from my being on their donor list. I wasn’t compensated at all, nor will I be for my involvement in the program.
1. In retrospect, I’m sure they weren’t real leather. I can’t imagine what it must be like to try to clean blood or any other fluids out of real leather, let alone what would happen when some wimp faints during a blood draw and ends up drenched in sweat.↩
