Hi Chirley,
The leucocyte reduced/filter blood product should also filter out any CMV. CMV negative blood is hard to come by. But still, if you are CMV neg, I think they should try to find it for you. John is CMV neg and his orders were for CMV neg but not all of his red cells were. They were reduced/filtered though.
Here's a link that lists 'rare' side effects from transfusions. Two are lung related and the suspected cause is either from too much fluid for the body to handle or antibody related.
http://www.cdc.gov/bloodsafety/basics.html
Three units is a lot of fluid. How fast did they infuse you? You must have been there all day. You may need them to slow the rate down even further.
John never found claratyne to be very effective. He used Atarax as a premed because benadryl didn't agree with him. Both make you sleepy. He only got steroids once during a platelet transfusion. They ran them in too fast and he turned into one big hive.
Whenever John had a bad reaction to a blood product, they would re-check the blood to see if there was a problem of some sort.