Let's start with the disease. We have three types of blood cells which are created in our bones. The red blood cells to carry oxygen, platelets to fix holes, and white blood cells, the police force of the body.
My police force has been going around killing perfectly healthy cells for the last couple years. That's what auto-immune diseases are.
Every new recruit that hits the streets is tainted, and becomes tainted right away, so this is what the doctors did.
First, they took a sample of my blood university, the bone marrow, millions of blood cells in training. Then, mostly over the last week, they gave me chemicals (the chemo) that killed off every single bad cop in the system. This has the affect of negatively impacting the red blood, platelets and university system, too.
For the next 8-10 days, I don't have any cops on the beat. It's blood anarchy, and the the medical condition is called neutropenic. They'll keep me filled with anti-virals, anti-fungals, and anti-bacterials, you can think of these as contract cops doing a temporary job. They don't have any skin in the game, so I probably will get at least a fever at some point, like a baby.
They already gave me back the bone marrow they collected, and I still have some left because they don't need to give the autologous (self-transplant) patients as much chemo as the allogeneic (used for blood cancers and other auto-immune therapies) but it is going to take about 10 days for my own bones to start making enough fresh new blood for them to safely let me go.
Let the boredom begin!
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