Let the harvesting begin!

Well, Dad is all hooked up on the apheresis machine. This is the machine that extracts the stem cells from Dad's blood. The blood goes out of one of his catheter tubes, through a lot of tubing, into a centrifuge that spins the blood and extracts the stem cells, then deposits the stem cells in one of the bags (the far right one that's hanging), then returns the blood back to Dad. It's pretty incredible.

Here's a detail of the apheresis machine with all the tubing and Dad's blood circulating through. It looks like something from a science fiction movie.

Here's the bag already with some stem cells! The bag contains layers....the top clear layer is a saline solution, the yellow layer under that is plasma, and below that are stem cells mixed with a bit of red blood cells and platelets.

Here's Dad's catheter with the goes-inta and the goes-outa tubes. Dad is doing fine. No reactions, no chilling....just doing fine. It should take about 3 or so hours today to get the required amount for the day. The total number of stem cells to shoot for for the entire process which will probably take several days is 1.5 minimum and 5.0 best possible number. I'm unclear about how many stem cells this is, but to the best of what I understand it's 1.5 X 10 to the 6th power X body weight in kilos. And if Jupiter aligns with Mars all will be well.