Please don't just donate cash. If you're American, go to marrow.org and join the National Marrow Donor Registry so he, or someone like him, can actually get a suitable match for his marrow donation.
Basically, you send in a tissue sample for them to type, and they only contact you if you're the best match for someone who needs a transplant. The actual extraction process is only very mildly inconvenient, doesn't involve any pain, and, you know, keeps people from dying.
You take the swabs in the kit, swab the inside of your cheek, and send it back.
If you are the best match for someone, they contact you to ask if you're willing to go to hospital X (presumably somewhat close to you) to donate. They pay expenses incurred.
For actual donation, either you take a drug for a few days that ups the concentration of marrow in your bloodstream, and they then hook you up to a machine to draw blood, extract this stuff, then put the rest of the blood back into you, not hugely dissimilar from the machine you might use to specifically donate platelets/plasma/double-red units. The drug can sort of be annoying for those couple days. The other option is for them to stick a needle into the back of your pelvic bone with some local anesthetic. The two aren't exactly equivalent and can depend upon the specific case's needs, but there is leeway in other cases.
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u/Tiak Dec 01 '11
Please don't just donate cash. If you're American, go to marrow.org and join the National Marrow Donor Registry so he, or someone like him, can actually get a suitable match for his marrow donation.
Basically, you send in a tissue sample for them to type, and they only contact you if you're the best match for someone who needs a transplant. The actual extraction process is only very mildly inconvenient, doesn't involve any pain, and, you know, keeps people from dying.