Arguably, the most demanding time at the treatment is the stem cell reinfusion. This is the crucial period where they are putting back the stem cells that they previously harvested before you have your four days of chemotherapy. The fewer bags they harvest, the easier the reinfusion is. I had 3 bags harvested and so had three bags to put back in…
You've essentially had your stem cells stimulated for four days in the hope that your bones will have produced enough stem cells for the team to harvest. It works out that they need about 2 million stem cells per kilogram of body weight. In my case, I was just over 80 kg. That's a lot of stem cells.
They wheel in a machine and plug it in next to you and which connects to your catheter in your neck. It takes blood out of your system, uses centrifugal force to separate what it needs and then sends blood back into your system. As far as I understand it, it's not a complete circuit that is continually taking blood out of one tube and putting it back in another. It takes blood out of one tube in your catheter and puts it back in that same tube once it gets out of it what it needs.
So after getting accepted on the treatment as a whole, the first proper thing that they need to do is to make sure that you are producing enough stem cells so that they can harvest them. To do this, they infuse your body with steroids to make sure that it is ready for the shock of stimulating the stem cells and they inject you with drugs that will encourage parts of your body, such as your pelvis and your sternum, to produce a greater number of stem cells that they can produce for the doctors to harvest. Hopefully, this video will make sense of that!
