I received good news this morning at 11 (one hour after my lab work) - my white cell count was 19 (thousand), up from 1.4 (thousand) yesterday. So the bone pain was a good sign. As the minimum WBC for starting apheresis is 3 thousand, I'm "there" as far as this goes. [The reason my WBC is higher than normal now is the Neupogen shots; that is expected, although I hit these good numbers a couple of days ahead of "normal"].
After this result came back good, I was allowed to put aside the HEPA filter mask and low-microbial diet for 2 - 3 weeks (until the high-dose chemo/transplant phase starts) - which was really good news as today was beautiful but a tad warm (in the 80s), so I was anxious to breath fresh air. I celebrated immediately by having Cathy drive me over to Rancho Shopping Center (on her way to her USTA tennis match) to meet my cycling friends for coffee after their Sunday morning ride. I then walked the ~2.5 miles home in the beautiful weather, I could certainly walk faster without the mask!
There was one more test they had to run following the good WBC count numbers - that was to ensure an adequate number of the "CD34" stem cells they want to collect during apheresis. They told me the "minimum number" to start would be 5. I just heard my result was 182, so I'm safely above this minimum :^) Unfortunately tomorrow is a very popular day for apheresis; they're moving some machines from the hospital to the Apheresis Area in the Cancer Center ITA to accomodate everyone. I'm scheduled to go in at 11:30 AM and hopefully get on a machine at noon or so. They tell you to plan to be there for 4 hours, you spend 3 hours in actual collection. As I understand it, I'll do this for 2 to 4 days depending upon how many stem cells they collect each day.
I certainly appreciate being able to enjoy the outdoors and open the windows again. We'll also likely go out (or get take-out) food for dinner tonight as I can do that now as well.
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