Apheresis what?

2013-10-17T02:23:00.002-07:00

Finally I have created a website that showcases my work, stories and passion for working with people to transform themselves and their lives using story.

So my first story is about apherisis. Now this was not a word I was familiar with until this week when I stared at it for several hours on the door of a small room at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.

In this room are two main things, a large chair for the patient and a machine. The machine is five years old and the nurses who operate it are fond of telling the story of its arrival.

There was much anticipation and they all went down to the store room somewhere in the bowels of the hospital for its 'unboxing'. The wrapping was removed, the machine plugged in and switched on and the manual located.

German.

Everything from the manual to the screen display was in German. For a very expensive piece of equipment from a very particular company this was perplexing.

However I digress. Apheresis is the process where a person's blood is removed, separated into its parts, whatever is being harvested is kept and the rest of the blood remixed and returned to the body.

In this particular case the method used is spinning which separates the parts based on density. My partner Adrian has a bone marrow cancer called myeloma and so his stem cells were being collected. These will now be stored and reintroduced to his body in order to stimulate his bone marrow cells to grow again, after a very heavy chemo regime.

I wish I had sat there and found some great metaphor for the inner transformations we go through in life and the blood transformation Adrian was having.

But really I was just gob smacked at the amazing process, the history of science and the many, many patients who went before Adrian and what they had to endure so that he could benefit.

The other main emotion I had of course was empathy. I was again working my way through the challenge of seeing Adrian's pain and having empathy and not feeling it so I can be the strength he needs.

Kate Lawrence - Story Business

Apheresis what?