Nigel's Stem Cell Extraction

Nigel managed to get a few pictures of when he was having his Stem Cells Extracted last Thursday, so I thought I would post them here for you all to see. There is some video as well, but I can’t do that from the hospital, so you will have to wait until I get home to put that together.

Above: The needle that they insert into your arm, not all of it of course, from the green bit to the end, but still a large needle and it is quite thick to allow the a large amount of blood to throw through it.

Above: This is the machine that you get hooked up to. The blood comes out of one arm, passes through the machine and then then blood minus the t-Cells return back into the other arm. One of the arms has to be kept still for several hours during the process.

Above: This is the centrifugal ring that the blood passes through as it spins at a high speed in the machine the blood products are seperated.

Above: Here you can see a close up of the various products extracted, I couldn’t tell you which each of them were, but I think there is at least platelets and t-cells.

Above: These are the t-cells going into me after they have bee extracted from Nigel

Above: This is me receiving them, but I don’t remember them going in, I was really quite ill and wasn’t aware of what was going on. It wasn’t the t-cells that did this, it was the fact that I had my new Hickman line fitted with a sedative and been to have my radio therapy over at Clatterbridge all a bit too much in one day, at least it was for me.