On Saturday evening I was at a little going away party with my friends, and I started to develop a headache. Whatever, right? Well it got so bad that I had to lay down in the car on the way home while Kaitlin drove because I thought I might lose my dinner.
Since then, the headache has been the bane of my existence. It is so debilitating - a throbbing, stabbing, pressing feeling - like a demon is trying to push its way through my eyeballs. I've never had a migraine but I now have sympathy for people who have to deal with them because I imagine this is quite similar. The only thing that eases it is if I lie flat on my back.
Apparently this headache is quite common after a lumbar puncture. You'll recall that the doctor removed some of my spinal fluid, which means that there is now a pressure imbalance in my head because the brain is normally floating in this fluid. When I sit or stand, a tiny bit of fluid is likely still leaking out the hole from the procedure as well, which means the only way to "fix" it is to lie in a supine position. Nothing else works. I've tried every combination of painkillers, coffee, and steroids, and they do absolutely nothing.
The frustrating thing is that when I lie down the headache resolves itself quite quickly, and then I want to get up and do stuff, but if I do it comes roaring back. This made driving to the mainland on Wednesday, and sitting in morning rush hour (between my parents' house in Langley and Vancouver General Hospital) yesterday morning a couple of excruciating experiences. I had to pull over to the side of the road a few times and go lie down in the back seat.
I am hoping the headache resolves itself today. The doctor told me yesterday that they usually resolve after 24-48 hours, but it's not unheard of for it to last up to two weeks.
In other news, I went for my stem cell collection yesterday. Again, it seems like I am "that" patient. You know, the one who has all the little hiccups along the way. As soon as the nurse looked at the veins in my arms she said "We can't use these. There's nothing here." I know that chemotherapy can kind of wreck a person's veins, but come on!!To make a long story short, I was sent downstairs for a little surgical procedure where a temporary line was inserted in the side of my neck, down my jugular vein, right up to my heart. Gross hey? It was a pretty simple procedure though, and the doctor put some local freezing in my neck so it didn't hurt or anything.
Once that was done, I headed back up to the 6th floor to begin the stem cell collection... two hours late, at 10:30 AM.
I've included a little video here where the nurse kindly explained the collection process, but basically I was hooked up to a centrifuge machine for six hours. It sucked my blood out one line, separated my stem cells, and pumped the blood back into me through the other line... over and over and over! Pretty neat, hey?
People often need to return one or two more times because the machine didn't collect enough stem cells, but luckily at 4:30 PM the results came in and I was good to go! I decided that since I wouldn't need to return to the hospital until Monday that I would bust my buns back to Victoria to spend one last weekend with Kaitlin.
So here I am, lying on the couch, hoping that when I stand up my headache will be magically gone, because all I want is two more days of quality time with my wife before I go away to Vancouver and become a vegetable for five weeks!
Thanks for reading,
Christopher
No comments:
Post a Comment