BMT: Day minus 11

Today, I started the pre-conditioning for my BMT, when I was given my first dose of chemo at 8am. To everyone's surprise, I was in high spirits and had a good appetite (I polished off my lunch and dinner, and didn't puke up any food!).

I had a special visitor today. Ronald McDonald came by my window (there are 5 huge floor-to-ceiling glass windows in my room) and made funny faces at me. I thought he looked strange with red curly hair, a painted face and a red nose. He wore a bright yellow outfit and I thought his red boots was way too big for his build ... how does he walk in those huge things?!

I also had a whale of a time playing with my bed. It has lots of buttons with cool features, like something out of a James Bond movie. I spent the afternoon trying out all the buttons. I discovered my bed can (apart from the usual features a hospital bed has) fold to become a chair. It can inflate and deflate. It has a button which says "Max inflate". After pressing that, my bed sounded like an aeroplane taking off and Mummy and Daddy got worried it was going to explode! It has a built-in weighing scale so should I get lazy for my daily 5am weighing routine, I can keep sleeping and the nurse can use the bed instead of the good old bathroom scales. If I was as tall as Daddy, I can extend my bed to make it very long. Should I decide to fall off my bed, it has a bed exit alarm to warn Mummy and Daddy, but I guess that would be too late! I haven't been able to figure out what heel suspension does yet - maybe tomorrow. After all my button pressing today, my bed ended up closer to the ceiling than the floor, and Mummy and Daddy couldn't figure out how to bring it back down again. They had to ask an expert in to reset it!

I am getting quite used to some of the routines these days, having gone through 4 rounds of chemo. I can now sleep through the mouth-washing procedure and the daily 5am FBC (full blood count test which involves a finger prick and the taking of a blood sample). One of the nurses said this first chemo bit is the honeymoon period (before the actual transplant on Day 0), but I hope I will be as happy as I was today throughout the entire BMT. If I can keep my appetite like today, I won't need to have a nasal feeding tube inserted (which is quite an incentive).