Almost fifteen years ago this summer is the time that I found out that I was a match to my youngest sister Laura. She had found out earlier in the year that she had Myelodysplastic syndrome. Her body was turning on her. She would die without treatment. Then our whole family was still alive.
Mom and Dad still lived in their home in Madisonville. My elder brother lived in Florida near Orlando with his wife. My younger sister Joyce lived with her spouse in Portland Oregon. Laura and her husband lived in south eastern Indiana and Cheryl and I lived in southwest Ohio in Cincinnati. Now only Joyce and I are still alive.
I think of these things when I donate blood four times each year. I ponder how long I can donate blood. The only answer I get when I search for that information is, as long as you are healthy, you can donate.
This started with Laura but I had donated blood before, just not on a regular basis. When I was in school at the University of Cincinnati in the last millennium an instructor whom many of us liked let slip some personal information about his family. His son had been in an accident and needed blood donations. Several of us went to Hoxworth to donate. I was too young so permission had to be obtained from my parent. Looking back this detail seems odd. I was eighteen at the time.
With Laura’s diagnosis and need for blood stem cells all of us siblings were tested to see if any of us were a match. Only I was a match. I found this out from the nurse who called me as was driving back towards Boston from Cape Cod. We had gone there for a little vacation and to visit with friends. This was convenient for Laura and me as neither of us had to travel far to do this but I had to get home first.
The summer of 2007 was a long one for Laura and me. I cannot speak for Laura because she did not make it out the other side of the treatment process. I am changed forever.
The process takes several days. For me it involved a very thorough physical and several meetings with the medical folks at the end of which I was deemed healthy enough physically and mentally to go through the process. During one meeting with a nurse who also had background as a sociologist, I was made aware of the fact that there was a chance that during the implantation process my stem cells could take over her bone marrow and give rise to my immune system within her body and reject her. Not simply that it might not take and we would have a do over. My immune system would reject her. Seems like a bad thing to happen, to be rejected by your own immune system.
Blood stem cells are removed from the donor in two ways either directly from your hip or by apheresis . In Laura’s case they used apheresis to remove blood stem cells from me and gave them to her after killing off her bone marrow’s ability to produce blood cells. Over a period of several days – my memory tells me four – I was given an injection of some growth hormone that told my body to make way too many blasts (precursors of various blood cells). These leak out into the peripheral circulatory system and can be retrieved by an apheresis machine. It was a miserable four days. Not so much at first but they can give you the injection anywhere and I opted for my arm. I am pretty sure that this started on a Monday so we were ready to do the apheresis on Friday. The had to get the blasts out of me before my body reabsorbed them.
The apheresis process takes a bit of time also. I do not remember talking about the actual process at the beginning. I suspect that if the donors are given all the gruesome details at the start, some will back out. The process was generally described as similar to donating blood except that the stem cells would be removed and the rest of my blood would be given back to me.
In this sketch you can see the general set up. Blood is removed from one arm and the returned processed blood is put into the other arm. Pick your nose, pee and fart before you get started because there is no moving around once the machine is running.
I asked the nurse technician who was monitoring the machine approximately how long it might take and she responded with eight to nine hours for the first session. She said sometimes they do not get enough the first time so they have to do it again to get more stem cells. I intermediately got up to find the men’s room and empty everything out and began to worry about how long my bladder would hold out. In the end it was not a concern. I suspect my kidneys did not understand what was happening so they elected to take a break for a few hours. I helped by not drinking anything of course but there was a bag of saline as a part of the process and some blood thinners to keep my blood from gumming up the pumps. Nine hours is a long time to sit.
Making conversation I asked how many cells they were trying to harvest. Ten to eleven million came the reply. I remember thinking that seems like a lot but I did not have any idea what they might need to do this. I was curious how they would figure out how many they had and she told me they would count them. It is amusing when you think about it. how else would you figure it out. Isolate a certain quantity of serum and under a microscope count the stem cells. Well, huh. Even an engineer can do that.
With all the needles and tubes in the correct position we started. I think the first session was about seven hours or so. There was a clock, one of those battery jobs, hanging on the wall opposite where I was sitting. What a poor place for an ineffective time keeper to hang. After five hours I was certain that it had slowed down. After six hours I was certain it had started running backwards ever so slowly. At the seven hour mark the stem cell bag which I estimated could easily hold a liter had a tiny amount of yellowish life saving liquid in it. The nurse pronounced it good and Cheryl took me home.
Oddly I was incredibly tired. I had not felt this exhausted before. I had not moved all day. But my blood did. It had been in and out of my body about ten times during the day. It was wore out. As I rested in my chair hovering between resting and sleep we got a call from the hospital, I needed to come back again for a second session. How many cells I asked. About four million was the answer. A disappointingly low number, I was certain that they would need two more times. I may have said shit out loud.
On the second day the procedure the was much faster. I spent approximately four hours in the chair with the stopped clock view. Often the donor’s body wakes up and puts more cells out there where the apheresis machine can find them. But that is not really why I am telling this story. There were several times during the next couple of weeks when I was called to go directly to Hoxworth to donate other bloods products to Laura. Platelets mostly as I recall. On a couple occasions I gave Laura platelets. I may have given her red blood cells also but I am unsure of that. She was busy staying alive and I was trying to help. All of these experiences got me used to the activity of donating blood.
I started doing this at the main Hoxworth Blood center near UC Hospital in Clifton and then later discovered that I could do this at another collection center in Blue Ash, Ohio. Once when I was there donating, the nurse technician asked me if I had ever considered giving a double red. After a discussion of what was entailed and other questions, I tried it.
This is Laura’s legacy. Her brother became so comfortable with donating he continues to do it fifteen years later.
I often think about Laura when I am sitting in the chair listening to the apheresis machine do its thing. There is no stupid clock to stare at. I know now how long it takes. It takes thirty to forty minutes. Sometimes it takes longer because the technician is often monitoring other donors. Most often I read a book on my tablet reader. Occasionally I listen to the patter of conversation around me.
Hoxworth is actively soliciting folks who have had SARS CoV2 disease because their blood contains substances that can help those who are recovering from that disease. These folks sit across from where I am donating.
Over the weekend the reward for donating was a free T-shirt. Free t-shirts were the give away today, Easter Monday also. I selected a St. Patrick’s Day themed shirt. It is in the picture.
Laura’s recovery was long and arduous and fraught with disaster. She spent about six weeks in a coma as doctors tried to discover the source of her liver inflammation. Veno-Occlusive disease was the suspected culprit.
Hepatic Veno-Occlusive Disease (VOD) AKA: Sinusoidal Obstruction Syndrome is a well recognized complication and leading cause of mortality in hematopoietic stem cell transplant resulting from severe hepatocellular necrosis and hepatic vascular congestion. — This is from a medical teaching website. Laura and I both read about it in a big white binder that she had gotten at the beginning of her process. I remember her looking at me that first afternoon with her yellowish face telling me that there was about a 3% recovery rate. Pretty crappy odds she said. She was a CPA and the controller of a small successful beverage distributor. She knew about numbers analysis and crappy odds.
It was not that. Eventually the doctors discovered that Laura was having a bad reaction to the antibiotics given to her as a prophylactic to infection while my stem cells were taking over. She did recover but six weeks asleep devastated her body. During a visit at the holidays she told me that my stem cells had populated her bone marrow and was doing fine. A few weeks later she succumbed to pneumonia that could not be treated in the conventional way because of her problems with antibiotics.
Laura died with a part of me in her. Part of me died when she passed out of existence in early 2008. Watching someone whom you worked so hard to save take their last breath is a profoundly life altering experience. I hope to never participate in an experience like that again.
Adjunct_Wizard 