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The National Marrow Donor Program, the registry that is used to find potentially life-saving tissue and cell donations for leukemia/lymphoma and auto-immune disorder patients, is holding an online drive for members in honor of Mother's Day.
The promotion, called "Thanks, Mom," urges people to join the marrow registry in honor of their mothers, thereby giving the gift of life to others to commemorate the life that your mother gave to you.
The best part of the promotion is that you can join the registry from 7 May to 21 May FOR FREE. The NMDP has received funding to allow people to register at no cost to them (the registration fee is usually $52, to cover the cost of the tissue-typing kit and the associated lab costs).
It's super-easy---just go to www.marrow.org and click on the "Thanks, Mom!" banner in the center of the page for more information. Go through the online registration process. Then, the NMDP will send you a tissue typing kit, which is essentially a cheek swab. You'll take a scraping of your cells from the inside of your cheek (like you probably did in high school biology), return the sample to the NMDP in a postage-paid envelope, and that's it!
Please take a minute to consider joining the registry. Many people who are eligible for marrow or stem cell donation aren't registered in the database, meaning that there could potentially be a leukemia/lymphoma/auto-immune patient out there who will go without a
transplant because their match wasn't registered.
So, if you join the registry and are selected as a donor, what happens next?
The donor would be asked to travel to the recipient's location (most health insurance companies, if they cover bone marrow transplants, would cover these expenses), and the process is about three days (minus, of course, all of the paperwork that would have to do prior to arriving at the hospital).
The first day is a routine medical scan and consultation, then the donor would sit down and discuss the procedure with the oncologist,
transplant coordinator, and perhaps a medical social worker.
The second day is the day of the transplant, which for the donor is an outpatient procedure. A needle is inserted into the iliac crest (the large ridge of bone right at the top of your posterior), and marrow is extracted. Then, the donor's part of the day is done, and the marrow goes to the hospital lab for screening and cleaning, then on to the recipient later that day. The next day, the medical team would examine the donor briefly to make sure that the extraction site was starting to heal properly.
Even if you decide that joining the National Marrow Donor Program isn't for you, please take the time to spread the word about this wonderful promotion. For what better way could you honor your mother than by giving the gift of life to another?
