The preparation for my brother's stem cell collection looks rather painful. First, the nurse inserted a needle on each arm. The needles are damn big! And they stayed in my brother's arms for 4 hours...ouch! Next she connected the tubes. My brother had to sit next to the machine. The machine would take blood from one arm (i think 200ml at a time), separate the stem cells from the other cells, and return the blood back through the other arm. So it cycles that way until it reaches 12,000ml. The target is to collect 3 million stem cells from my brother to transplant into me.
When the collection finished, we all went out to lunch while waiting for the clinic to call us back with the stem cell count. After about an hour an a half, we received a call from the clinic, saying that they only managed to collect 2.33 million stem cells. So he went back today for another session.
Today we managed to collect another 5 million stem cells. Yay!! It's more than enough...so there's going to be enough for me, and for my brother to store for himself in case he needs it in the future.
The stem cell collection machine from the back. Note the yellow bag contains plasma, and the red one contains waste. At this point the first batch of stem cells haven't been separated yet.
The front view of the machine. It looks quite ancient huh? But apparently it's a very high tech machine that costs about RM300,000!
