Tied to a Huge Lego Machine, and a Needle in the Prostate

So today the Dendritic Cell Therapy begins. The first step is "leukophoresis" -- they need to harvest a bunch of my white blood cells to send off to the lab. The lab will use them to manufacture Natural Killer cells and Dendritic cells (that's my current understanding of the process, anyway)

What this means today is that I have a 2" long needle plunged into each arm. My blood goes out one arm and into a really amazing-looking contraption: there are plastic tubes spread out over a diagram on the front panel of a machine with various pumps. I can see the blood going in and out of all the tubes -- it's interesting to imagine what all the stages are doing. Kristina (one of the nurses here) is competently adjusting all the parameters, but can't really explain it to me all that well because of the language barrier. All I have to do is watch one gauge and make sure it doesn't get below a certain level -- I squeeze my left fist repeatedly if it does (which increases the pressure of the blood coming out of my arm.)

At the top of the machine are several bags -- some for saline or other compounds that are being pumped into me, and one for the leukocytes (white blood cells), which are a pale orange. Kristina has a color chart she compares with it occasionally, and makes adjustments to the machine when the color is off.

At the end of the line the remaining blood comes back into my other arm. It's a pretty interesting process as long as I abstract from the needles in my arms -- Liz is more freaked out by it than I am.

The other "highlight" of the day is a direct result of giving the green light for the dendritic cell therapy. To mark the cancer cells, Herr Doktor wants to give me an injection of the Newcastle Disease Virus directly into my prostate, since that's where the bulk of my tumor is. I blithely assent, and soon I'm lying on a table with various fingers and needles aimed at my prostate. What I didn't count on was the pain -- I had no idea that there were pain receptors inside the prostate.

Now I know, believe me!