bone marrow donation
right now i am at the marriott hotel in jacksonville on the mayo clinic campus.
sore, achy, and tired after just donating 6 million of my white blood cells.
actually, i signed up for this thinking i was getting backstage passes. madi, christina, and i saw the DKMS tent at warped tour 2007. we ended up giving them our information and dna via cotton swabs in return for "backstage passes", which really didnt give us special access to anything.
i get a call a year and a half later saying i am the only dna match for a 38 year old woman with leukemia. she had already gone through chemotherapy, and this procedure usually happens as a last resort for a patient whose chemo "failed." i had no idea at warped that i would end up donating, in a sense, life, to another person i dont even know.
the last four days i have been receiving injections of <u>filgrastim</u>, which causes me to produce extra white blood cells that are attached to my bone marrow. today, they stuck needles in both of my arms as they retrieve the extra cells and put the other blood, called a <u>peripheral blood stem cell donation</u>. the procedure took five hours, and i did not get any sort of compensation.
they give the cancer patient drugs to kill off her immune system, and replace her cancerous cells with my healthy ones. so if i were to have gotten into an accident or something en route, the patient would have died.
so i am sharing this information with all 948 of my friends in hopes that maybe you will be inspired to register as a donor and help someone with leukemia
if anyone is interested in signing up as a donor and possibly saving another person's life, please check out these websites:
- main website
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2215859467 - Facebook group
http://www.facebook.com/pages/New-York-NY/DKMS-Americas/31625604690 - become a fan!
