CD32: Doing Crazy Shit While I Wait For AF

I was riding the couch with J tonight, watching something mindless on Channel 11 and they break to what's on tomorrow night...and it's none other than Dr. Moustache on a show about people having babies via IVF. Bleh. We can't escape him even in the privacy of our own living room. It was deja vu of a whole new variety. HIS voice in OUR living room. What could be more creepy? Thank god Statia wasn't here. She hates him more than I do and might have thrown something at our new TV.

What else?

I stopped taking my lexapro. Cold turkey. I may regret this any moment now, and I almost did this morning as my heart was beating so hard I thought that it was "it", but after that I have mostly felt headachey and a bit bitchy. My old self returning or what? :-) Now if my libido would just return! But I can tell that I'm having side effects from this choice of mine to quite cold turkey. It's 2:30AM and I'm up buying shit on ebay and feeling not quite right. Bit of pressure in m head and my jaws feel tense. When I was taking lexapro I could barely stay awake past 11PM. My old self is definitely on the horizon, and she's not too far away. I can almost see her.

So maybe you recall my crazy posts where I was going to do my own LIT treatments and skip ever having to go to Mexico and pay Dr. Q $600 for a LIT treament ever again? Well given that LIT is the ONLY thing that reduces my NK cells, and I have a while until my next IVF, I did it: I started to buy the lab equipment that I'll need to get this done.

Tonight, on ebay, I bought:

50 Sterile 21g BD Butterfly Syringes with 3/4" needles and leur locks
100 Sterile Pasteur Pipettes

I've already got insulin syringes for delivery and a latex tourniquet.

And I've got my eye on a really sweet centrifuge with swing out rotors...all digital controls, temperature control, variable speeds, and a timer. I will be stylin' with this thing.

What else do I need?

• Gloves (costco)
  
• One Use Holders. You attach butterfly syringe to this so that you can slip the vacutainer tube onto the needle end. (ebay)
  
• Sterile 15ml Centrifuge Tubes with Caps (ebay or old lab where I worked)
  
• Sterile PBS Buffer for washing step (where to get? making sterile solutions is a PAIN without a lab!!)
  
• Sterile Hartmans's or Ringer's solution for resuspending & injection (A pain. Where to get?)
  
• BD Cell Separation Tubes. These are so cool. One step separations! BD says you can't use these for in vivo applications, but I'd be washing the separations 2 or 3 times, pelleting, and resuspending before injecting. They'd be darned clean by the time I'm done with them.
  

I think that is actually about it and I hope to have everything at least ordered by the end of this week so that I can get started.

I'm THIS CLOSE to being able to do my own LITs. Amazing! I know it's crazy shit to be doing this. You don't have to tell me this. But I've done a lot of research on this procedure and I really think it can be safely done without a physician's supervision. The big deal here is using sterile technique, which I have done in my job in the lab time and time again. Keeping sterile and being meticulous about isolating that buffy coat and not letting it get contaminated with RBCs are the important issues here. Last thing we want is any of J's type B+ blood mixing with my A+. Imagine the hoopla that would ensue in the ER room as I tried to explain myself. It would be even more entertaining than last month's trip to the ER when I thought I'd aspirated a garbanzo bean into my lungs.

So I'm going to do it. It's scary to experiment on oneself, but I'll hit up RI's office tomorrow and see if they won't share any of the procedure with me. I know it's illegal to actually DO the procedure to someone since the FDA ban, but to share information about an "outdated procedure" doesn't really fall under any regulation.

I'll definitely photodocument the entire procedure when I finally get around to doing this. Hopefully soon!

Stay tuned for more crazy shit as my lexapro wears off. :o)