Today we get the show on the road! 11:00 am steroid infusion. Steroids do two things to me: Rev me up and make me talkative. Now there are those of you who think I'm loquacious normally; turn that up by 100 when I'm on steroids. Scary, isn't it? John and I usually take a stroll down the hall visiting with our new HSCT friends. John has learned to let me sit on the seat of the rollator so he has control of when we leave each room. He just proceeds to start rolling me out as I'm mid-sentence which is truly kind to our new friends. The nurse comes at 11pm and 3am to give the neupogen shot to stimulate those little stem cells to start leaving the bone marrow and gravitate to the blood stream. This procedure lasts four days, and then they install a port in my jugular vein to extract the stems through. I will, hopefully, have produced two million per kilogram of weight. There's yet another reason to hate being overweight! I have to produce more stem cells. Oh, the first three days I lost three pounds. I thought, hey, this might be the most expensive weight loss program yet! Of course, this has not continued. They serve four meals a day: 8:30 breakfast of cream of wheat? Or rice? Two pieces of bread and baby yogurt. 11:00: Second breakfast or mid-morning snack of 2-4 baked apples, boiled egg, and slice of roast. 2:30: Lunch of large serving of mashed potatoes (real ones), 2 slices of bread, yogurt, mystery meat unless there is cow tongue or no meat. Sometimes they serve a small can of what appears to be baby food meat as it has a picture of a baby on it. One patient wittily called it boiled baby head! Wait, I'm not finished! 5:30 Dinner (or supper if you're from the southern USA) consisting of some sort of high fiber soup, more bread, sometimes mystery meat but not tonight. Tonight we had some sort of dessert that looks like cheese cake or bread pudding, firm consistency, slightly, with raisins baked into bottom. Quite good. I suspect they might eat more healthfully than us Americans, except for the massive amount of bread. It is fresh baked- no preservatives, but it is not my favorite. Oh, they leave your dishes in your room, and you are expected to wash them yourself!
That's enough for today. It is 11:30 and the sun has just gone down, It will be light about 4 am. A sleep mask is imperative.
