Least favourite medical procedures so far

 I know that there are quite a few more interesting procedures down the line, but so far most of them have been fairly mild. 

The chemo has been mainly a doddle. Tablets and small injections into the stomach fat. I have hardly had a single cannula and most patients seem to have one every time they turn up at chemo. Later on with the Stem Cell Transplant there will be interesting new things, including what I believe is called a Hickson Line, so that they can put drugs into me without have to put cannulas in each time. 

But the procedure that has been most 'interesting' so far is the one they are going to repeat tomorrow, the bone marrow biopsy. The squeamish have probably already stopped so I will carry on without them. The point is that for certain purposes you don't want just blood samples to see what is happening (and everything produced in the marrow eventually goes out into the blood anyway). Sometimes you need to see how the cells are doing inside the marrow, which is where the cancerous cells that form myeloma come from. I think that all the bone marrows are involved in the process, but for sample purposes they like to use big bones which have plenty of marrow and plenty of cancer in them.

I think they sometimes use the big bones of the femur, but for this procedure the hip bone is the target. As I've had it once, I can tell you what they did last time. The very personable doctor explained what they were doing it for, how it would work and what I'd need to do, and then they give you an anaesthetic injection in the back of your hip, just an inch or two to the right of the spine. 

You then lie on your side and the doctor uses a probe a bit like a bradawl to drill a hole through the bone into the marrow. When that is through they can extract a couple of millilitres of the liquid marrow, using some kind of syringe. I don't know exactly how they do it because everything is taking place behind me.  The odd thing is that I had assumed you wouldn't have any nerves inside your bones so couldn't feel anything, but in fact you can feel a distinct and odd suction as they remove the sample.

At the end they also sometimes take a bone core sample, like a cheese sample from a big cheddar but much narrower, so that they have all the information about what is going on inside my bones. 

Afterwards it doesn't actually hurt much at all, but you do have a couple of punch marks in the back of your hip for the next week or two. If it wasn't being done to me I would find it probably even more interesting. But the Primary Science teacher in me is always excited to find out what they are doing and why.