About the nuts & bolts of bone marrow donation

A good thing.

I signed up to be a bone marrow donor on BeTheMatch. It’s easy. You do it online. They send you a cheek swab in the mail.

I was inspired, no hyperbole, by someone in my family who was saved by a bone marrow donor. This relative is fairly private so I’ll just call him my “close relative.” The inspiration is that he’s now two years cancer free and has just been in contact with his bone marrow donor. And every time I think about the impact this donor made I tear up. He saved my relative’s life.

In this era where a lot of us are hyper aware of the lives we can’t save, it feels so powerful to reverse the frame of reference and realize the lives we could. Even one.

This donor was 24, was starting an immunology program, and the science of transplanting one person’s bone marrow into another made sense to him. It makes much less sense to me — and feels more akin to some medieval leach medicine. First you poison the existing cancerous bone marrow with chemo until it’s all dead and gone. Then you inject some healthy person’s stem cells into the first person’s blood stream, like a blood transfusion. Magically, those stem cells take hold and turn into new bone marrow. At one point there was a group of doctors who honestly thought this process would work and it turns out they were right.

My close relative sent me some info to give color to the process of bone marrow donation, but more so to suggest an additional step…