I can't ever come up with clever titles for posts... usually it's a line from a song that strikes my fancy at that moment. Anyways, yesterday I went to one of our local middle schools to sign up to be a bone marrow donor. My life has been greatly affected by organ donation, a very close friend's nephew, an uncle, and someone I work with have all received the gift of life. One thing that I find so interesting about organ donation, some donations can come from live donors. (i.e. livers and kidneys) and I have always said, if it were a family member it would be no question if i would give them one of my organs. But what if it were to a complete stranger?
There is a young girl in our community that has leukemia, and is in need of a bone marrow transplant. I was hesitant to go and find out about bone marrow donation, but I have done alot of research online and decided to go after I saw a documentary on live donation just last week. And one of them happened to be a bone marrow donation. The chances of a person surviving after a bone marrow transplant is only about 30 to 50%, but that's a chance that this person didn't have if they do not receive it.
I was amazed at how many people from the community came out to support this young girl and just to sign up to be a bone marrow donor. However, when you sign up for Be The Match, you have to be willing to give to any person in need, not just a specific person. The person that was my screener just happened to be a survivor of sucha transplant. He was very informative, and said that there is an 80% chance that I may never get called to donate. But the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to become a part of this.
There are two ways that you can donate, one is to have a team go into your pelvic bone and extract bone marrow at multiple locations. This requries anestesia and about 3 days of recovery. However, as I was told, the most common procedureis a PBSC donation. In this case the donor wll reveive daily injections of filgrastim to boost white blood cells forming in your blood streem. Then your blood is removed from one arm and passes through a machine that seperates the blood forming cells and then the remaining blood is pumped back into your body through the other arm.
A very minimal procedure that can be done outside of a hospital. I was shocked at how easy of a procedure that this could be but have such a large impact on the person receiving this. Anyways, I was just so moved by the entire situation that I thought I would share. The only test that they run during your screening is 4 mouth swabs, not even a finger prick.
I didn't want this to be a depressing post, but an exciting one. It was so wonderful to see a communtiy be so willing to donate to strangers at the hope of just one of them might be the match for someone we do know.
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