© 2006 by Curt Miller
This is me at 9:25 Thursday morning in the Apheresis unit at Albany Medical Center, hooked up to the apheresis machine where my plasma (and the antibodies causing my myesthenic symptoms) will be centrifuged from my blood. Thirty-five hundred CCs of albumen will replace my plasma.
The Daily bLog
Life has its way of throwing obstacles in one's path to divert us from our planned direction of travel. Today was one of those days. At 8:00 am I found myself lying on a hospital bed being readied for a complete exchange of all my blood, separation of its component parts from one another, and the admixture of fresh albumen (a fraction of human blood...and yes, it does froth up into a wonderful meringue!). The exchange rate de jur was 85 ml per minute. With a target of 8500 ml drawn from my body (yes, about 1 1/2 times what we all have), this process took about an hour and a half.
After a wonderful exchange with my hematologist, Dr. Dunn, who quickly told me I was "full of shit" when I told him I was the Henry Miller's grandson, my wonderful nurse Paula stuck me with the 16 ga needles - one in each arm - for the apheresis.
To simplify this whole affair, it's really like flushing the cooling system in your car, where you hook a garden hose into one side of the system and a drain hose to the other end. Only difference here is that the blood comes out and goes into a centrifuge and then is mixed with fresh faux plasma. The new mixture of blood cells and plasma goes into the other arm. My other hematologist yesterday, Dr. Ed Taft, told me if this process had been around 30 years ago, Aristotle Onassis would have survived his myasthenic crisis and lived a few more years so Jackie would have had to wait a bit longer. Funny.
Actually, I learned something today. Nurse Paula asked me why I waited so long to come in for treatment. I told her that I thought I was doing quite well without it and thought it was only for critically affected myesthenics. So, she looks at me and says "let's see: you can't swallow, talk or lift anything...you've lost 50 pounds in a year...hmm. That's pretty serious." "Well," says I, "I'm not a hypochodriac." "No, I guess you're NOT," retorts Paula. "Look, I've never seen anyone with MG before," I say. "Well, I see them all the time and you're in bad shape."
Live and learn.
