A stem cell harvest. That sounds exciting and high tech, doesn’t it?

A pity, then, that it just involves me sitting hooked up to a machine for six (possibly 12) hours. Oh the fun.

For the last 10 days I’ve been having GCSF injected into me. The idea is to give my bone marrow a kick up the arse (or leg, as the case may be) and produce a crapload of blood stem cells. Normally these blood stem cells would turn into whatever was required in the bone marrow – red blood cells, white blood cells or whatever. However, this GCSF stuff makes my bone marrow make so many blood stem cells that they spill out into the peripheral blood, meaning when I have this tube in my leg they can pump the blood through a machine which does some black magic and sorts out these excess cells from the rest of my blood and store them.

All the while I get to lie there doing bugger all. And if they don’t get enough first time round, they hook me up again until they get as many as they need. 6 hours (at least) straight without internet (no wireless remember >_<) I’m going to have withdrawal symptoms.

Talking of internet, I know I shouldn’t have said “yes” to doing a video for jimmyteens. Instead of “Adam” I’m being referred to by relatives as “our resident music maestro!” or similarly embarrassing titles, all because of a 2 minute video of me making a hash of playing the guitar. And I’m being put on the “Southampton DVD” as well…I guess it’s only 2 minutes of pain. I blame my sister mainly; she’d told all of her friends literally hours after it was put on the internet – so I’m getting messages from people I barely know saying “nice video” with a smirk. I know I shouldn’t have hyped it up or mentioned it here either. Oh well, it’ll blow over, hopefully sooner than later.

Yesterday was the Sixth Form induction day. I didn’t go for all of it, just for a talk in the morning and one in the afternoon. Our school’s sixth form is broken up between two schools – I go to Elizabeth College, an all-boys school, and up the road is Ladies’ College which, as the name implies, is an all-girls school. In the sixth form the two combine, meaning I have lessons both at Elizabeth and Ladies’ Colleges, as do most other people in the year. This would be good if I was at full health, as I’d be able to have lessons with friends at Ladies’, meet new people, etc. However, neither of the schools are accessible at all for wheelchairs/crutches (steps galore, especially for all the subjects I’m doing), and my timetable has 11 movements at least between the two colleges. This may or may not be a problem, depending on how much I get to school post-op, but you can see the potential difficulties.

The actual induction day itself was quite surreal really. I’d hardly seen any of my friends since the end of May, and then suddenly everyone was there, in suits no less. It was weird seeing old faces, seeing how people had changed (or hadn’t) and catching up with what people had been doing, their GCSE results etc. I also got singled out in the second talk for wearing a hat (I’d been given permission by my school, but not Ladies’) and had to suppress the urge to play the ultimate guilt trip on the person by saying I had both permission and cancer. To be fair, she did apologise afterwards when she realised.

Anyway, that’s what’s been happening recently, and what will be happening, so that’s that really.