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They give your body three days to rest and on the third day, you are transplanted. This is very exciting time. They are literally giving you your life back. They bring you to the brink and then they save you by giving you back your own stem cells that they froze. They brought all these little packets of frozen cells into the room, and these are thawed out in the room, and the steam rises up. It's all very mystical. They go into your body through the IV that you're already hooked up to. These stem cells, it's like they have little magnets and they know to go right to the bone marrow. They tell you it could be 10-15 days before you start showing any cells counts. During that time you have no way to fight infection. You can't even fight viruses or any bacteria that already exist in your body. So, they expect you to run fevers and get infections. Most of the time, those can be controlled with antibiotics. |
