Step one for my Car-T is done ✅.
I had my white blood cells collected on Monday. They are on their way across the country to New Jersey, to be engineered into Chimeric antigen receptor T cells to kill myeloma cells.
The procedure went well, thankfully. My veins were good enough and held up for a double IV, one in each arm. The nurses decided my best outflow vein for the big IV was in my bicep. That was a new one for me. But it was actually a pretty good spot.
I had 15 liters of blood pumped out of me. The white blood cells were filtered out and then the remainder was pumped back in.
The human body holds about 5 liters of blood, so all of my blood was taken out and put back in 3 times. So, as you could image, I’m pretty tired from all of that. It sort of feels like I ran a marathon and I’m ready for a goodnight sleep, except I just woke up in the morning.
I usually don’t post pictures of hospital things, but since Car-T is newer, I thought I would show a bit more.
This is what my bag of white blood cells looked like. It has some red blood cells mixed in with it, which is why it’s pretty red. Your red blood cells and platelets also drop as a result from the apheresis, so that’s part of the reason for the tiredness.
I’m told, that when they come back from being engineered, they will be a light pink color.
In the lab in New Jersey, they will filter all the other cells out until it just down to T cells. Then they will test the T cells to see how viable they are and make sure they are of good quality. The finished edited cells have to have a quality rating of at least 80, which was set my the FDA. If they are 70-80, you and your doctor have to decide whether to go through it still or not. If they are below 70, then they get scrapped and you have to try again.
So I was trying my best to try to scrub my cells and get them as healthy as I could. When I had my cells collected, it had been 7 weeks since the last chemo infusion. So I was factoring 2 weeks for the chemo to mostly be cleared, which left me with 5 weeks to heal.
Well, I think I’m going to take a nap 🥱, hopefully I snap out of the fatigue thing soon!
Carrots Over Cancer 
Hi Jothi,
Nila her T-cell transplant in February. It was a last resort for her. After the apheresis she spent about two weeks in the hospital then we spent almost a month living in a hotel room next to the hospital where she went every day for a checkup. You’ll have to be extra carful to always wear a mask, stay away from pets, and never eat out, nor eat food handled by others for at least the first 6 months, since you are getting an entirely new immune system.
Since her treatment she has had three PET scans that so far show total remission. She will have to get her baby shots in a few months.
They sorted through the t-cells sorting out the D8 ones and then attach a protein that bonds with the cancer cells. It completely killed off her cancer cells.
Your in good hands.
Iraja
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Thanks for writing. I’ve been wondering how she was doing/recovering. It sounds like it was quite successful for her, so that awesome!
Is a pet scan how they measure for lymphoma? For myeloma, it’s a bone marrow biopsy, which isn’t very pleasant.
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