Stem Cell Transplant Day 1

Well, I'm here.  Arrived at 9am just like I was told.  Walk up to the admissions desk and the lady tells me that I'm not in the system.  Great.  Why not.  I mean, why would this go smoothly.  She tells me just to go have a seat while they figure it out.  About 20 minutes later another lady comes out to register me.  She tells me that I am supposed to be admitted, but the Bone Marrow Unit doesn't have my information in the system, and they seem to have lost my identification number or something like that.  So, she registers me and tells me to go back and wait again, saying that she is waiting on the Bone Marrow folks to call her back.  So, I go sit.  About 20 minutes later she comes out and says that my room won't be ready until between noon and 3pm.  Tells me we can leave and come back later, or just continue waiting.  Just at that time my transplant coordinator returned my call.  She said that we needed to go to the Bone Marrow Clinic and they would go ahead and do lab work and things like that to move the process along.  So, that's what we did.  Headed to the Bone Marrow Clinic.

 

I hope you aren't expecting anything exciting to have happened at the Bone Marrow Clinic.  Because it didn't.  We waited and waited and waited and waited and waited.  Finally my coordinator calls again telling me to go to Infusion Suite B.  I tell her that is where we have been forever.  She says "Oh.  Well then I will tell them you are there and they can get your labs."  Um...Ok.  Long story short, they put my in a little room but never take my labs.  I ordered some lunch while we were waiting.  A chef salad.  I figured two things:  1)It can't take that long to make a chef salad and 2)You can't screw up a salad.  Well, an hour and a half later I got my salad.  And it was disgusting.  Rotten tomatoes, wilted lettuce, slimy cucumbers, and the shredded cheese was melted.  What?  How the heck does cheese become melted onto a cold salad?  The turkey and the ham were yuck too.  Evidently I was wrong on both counts. 

 

Finally a little after 3pm my room was ready.  We get to the Bone Marrow Unit and find out the room I will be in is a temporary room, and that hopefully tomorrow they will get me into a normal chemo room.  Geez.  The nurse says she needs to do labs before we can start chemo.  Problem is my name isn't in the system.  Ok.  What the hell?  How does this keep happening?  Anyway, they finally draw blood.  The nurses are all super nice.  My nurse fell in my bathroom before I arrived so she was limping around with her knee wrapped up so she had to go get that checked out.  We were given a tour of the unit, and I was happy to learn that I can help myself to whatever I want in the Nutrition room!!  This is good news since the food here is terrible! 

 

At 6pm the nurse comes in to take blood cultures from my port so that they can say it is not infected.  Easy enough, right?  Well, if it wasn't me it probably would be.  But, since doing things the easy way doesn't exist in my world, it wasn't easy.  After obtaining a second opinion, my nurse came to the conclusion that my port has flipped and can't be accessed.  Yep.  That's right.  Flipped.  The doctor said to let it go for now, but that he may want a chest Xray in the morning.  Chemo starts at 9pm tonight. 

 

I just ordered dinner.  I ordered a cheeseburger and fries.  Surely they can't screw that up, can they?