Would You Watch a Movie to Save Someone's Life?

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You've seen the bone marrow donation process in medical dramas, right? As I recently discovered, the needle-to-the-hip donation is pretty outdated. Here's why modern donation is a whole different ballgame. Only thirty percent of donations involve actual bone marrow. (The ones that do are mostly for children, who seem to do better with traditional bone marrow transplantation.) Seventy percent of the time, being a "bone marrow donor" is only a tad more complicated than donating blood. Seven out of ten donors go through a procedure called Peripheral Blood Stem Cell donation, or PBSC. This is so doctors can harvest hematopoietic stem cells, which generally reside in the bone marrow itself, giving rise to red and white blood cells. But stem cells don't always stay put, and can escape into the blood stream. These days, donors get brief shots of filgrastim, which encourages the stem cells out of the marrow and into the blood. The donor then goes through apheresis, which is a bit like donating blood except the blood gets returned to the body after it goes through a machine that harvests the stem cells. Yes, this does involve two needles to the arm, one to suck the blood out and one to put the blood back, but it's not a surgical procedure. It's just a few hours of lying around, watching movies. Both procedures, bone marrow donation and PBSC, do essentially the same thing: harvest stem cells. The only difference is the degree of complication. So if you're interested in being a donor, but scared of the pain or complication of a traditional bone marrow transplant, things have changed. Odds are the whole procedure doesn't involve anything more complicated than sitting in a chair waving goodbye to your extra stem cells.

If you would like to join the marrow donor registry click this link:



http://bethematch.org/



It's amazing that such a simple act can literally save lives