THE HARVEST

Doesn’t sound like something that will take place in NY. I visited the blood bank nurse to have my veins evaluated. She told me I needed a port, she didn’t think my veins would make it. I made an appt to check into the hospital to have a Leukafresa port put in-everything is named after someone.
The idea was that a tube was going to be inserted into my heart (I think) three tubes would be sticking out of my chest. The nurse could use one to take blood and the other to give me whatever I needed. The third was for just in case. I had to give myself shots for seven days before the harvest to stimulate stem cell growth. While I was in the hospital, the nurse taught me how to give myself a shot. We didn’t practice on me; we practiced on a pillow.
Later in the week, I wasn’t feeling very well and I called my nurse so told me to call into Urgent Care-that’s Sloan’s emergency room and get my nose swabbed. After forever, I was told I had RSV virus and should stay the night. They told me I could still harvest on Monday but would have to be checked before I could come into the hospital.
The night before the harvest, I called my Michele, my very own life coach/guru/dreamer and said that I wasn’t much good at visualizing. I loved the concept and could frame it, I just6 couldn’t see it. So she stayed with me on the phone and I didn’t give up. Little by little, I had a glimpse of a blue vista filled with white siggly things that I decided were a variation on sperm—something I had got the image for many times before. I didn’t make much of the image, didn’t judge it or try to change it. It faded and we talked about the chattering mind. The blue vista came back into focus. It was pretty amazing. I am so text driven that I don’t see pictures in my head. I have a running text bar like CNN. In fact I can’t stand to watch any of those news programs with that scroll because I can’t follow the picture, I must read the text.
Michele and I stayed on the phone until sleep lulled me in. I said good night and went to the land of the blue vista with the white squiggly things.
The following morning I met Jeanne and Margie at the blood bank. The nurse tested me and said that I still had the virus but that I could harvest. I got into this bed in a room with four other set-ups. The guy across from me was actually going to use his veins, no port for him, a little hairless boy with opaque skin crawled into the bed to my right. His mother was by his side.
My sisters and I decided we would play gin for the four hours and we set the game up. Jeanne and I remembered how to play from when were kids and Margie, well she’s a good sport. She humored us and just played. The nurse became her tutor. She hooked my port up to the machine and explained that all of my blood would be coming out of my body and be filtered by this machine. The stem cells would be collected by the machine and the rest of the blood would be sent back into my body. A little vampire moment? The funny thing was that, I felt nothing, save for a tiny chill later on.
The harvest was a minimum of two days. By the end of the day, a controversy ensued. The doctor shouldn’t have allowed me to be with the genral population because of the virus. She tried to blame the nurse who had been taking care of me, but how could we allow that, not only had she harvested the stem cells, she kept the gin game going. She told us that when I came back tomorrow, I’d have to go into insolation. I worried about the little luminicent boy and the man who simply opened up his veins for the harvest. Both their immune systems were challenged. I prayed I didn’t add to their illness.

Later that night I had a message from my nurse, “Corinne, this is a first. You don’t have to come in tomorrow. You harvested 26,000,000 stem cells—enough for six transplants.” This was really exciting. I thought about the blue vista with the whiter squiggly things and wondered.

When I saw Dr. Comenzo I told him about the creative visualization and he said that he believes that the mind is a valuable tool in recovery and survivial. I told him about the blue vista and he smiled. “We inject the stem cells with blue dye so we can see them under the microscope.” All righty, then.