Today, we visited St. George's Hospital in Tooting Beck, to get a couple of tasks out the way. First was the stem cell harvest. This is when you are hooked up to a large dialysis machine that filters out any excess stem cells floating in the blood stream due to the leukaemia. Normally, a person would have very few stem cells in the blood stream (they usually reside in the bone marrow). But since I've got leukaemia, there are plenty in my blood. The only awkward thing was that I was unable to lie on my back thanks to the operation, and I spent three-and-a-half hours on my side waiting for the harvest to be completed.

The purpose of the harvest can be likened to an insurance policy, although not a very good one. Since a BMT (bone marrow transplant) is the only long term solution available, preparations need to be made in case my body rejects the donor's bone marrow if/when the transplant occurs. This is otherwise known as host vs. graft disease, and occurs at some level of severity in all transplants, as the body doesn't recognise the donor tissues. With a BMT, the new donor blood that may not recognise my body tissues, as the blood came from an unrelated person. If there is a severe rejection, the harvested stem cells can be reinserted into my body whilst an alternative donor or solution can be found, otherwise the patient can die in cases of severe rejections. However since I've got leukaemia, not all the stem cells are good which is why this is not a very good insurance policy.

With the harvest completed, a sperm donation was required. The reason is that the high dosage of radiotherapy needed prior to BMT will (in most cases) cause infertility. Since I'm only 26 and not married with kids, should I want to start a family at some point in the future I won't have any sperm to do so. Therefore the donation is made and the seed is frozen until it is required for IVF treatment. This is not the way I would have wanted to have my own children, but it's the only option available. I always imagined what a sperm bank would look like, whether there would be a number of private booths, with some sort of aid such as reading material or otherwise (nurses perhaps?). This couldn't be further from the truth, as I was lead up a level to a small toilet along with a jar and asked to produce some samples. The only consolation was; so I was told, was that I had a very high sperm count, so no doubting my potency at the moment!