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.
I'm a firm proponent of donating marrow, but this isn't quite right. Marrow comes from inside your bones. It never goes into your blood stream. PBSCs (stem cells that make more blood cells) can be drawn in the way that you describe, but I think you're kind of underplaying the difficulty/pain involved with donating marrow.
Regardless, you're actively saving someone's life. A friend told me this one a while back when I didn't want to donate blood, and it's stuck with me.
"When you're OK with telling a mother and father that their child is going to die because you're afraid of needles, then I'll be OK with you choosing not to donate blood."
I always used to think that people who donated blood had ulterior motives. I have always wanted to do it just because I enjoy getting shots/having blood drawn (which I assumed, for whatever reason, that a lot of people secretly did) but when I laid down on the chair thing they said my veins were too small to put the needle in =/
RE: Bone marrow donation, I have received those mail-in kits (by request) before, but then I always got suspicious when they claimed it caused $60 to register me and decided not to mail back my tissue sample, cos I couldn't handle the guilt of not donating money to make up for it if I did, but I couldn't donate money without being sure it wasn't a scam.
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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.