Register as a Bone Marrow Donor

You Can Help Save My Husband Doug and Others Like Him

"Sure," I said, "I will be happy to register as a marrow donor." It seems like an easy thing to do and, well, if I can save someone's life, all the better. This was my response as a college kid when asked if I would consider being a marrow donor in the late 80s. Honestly, I never thought much about it again and I was never called to help someone. As chance would have it, that decision became much more vivid and real to me when doctors at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston told my husband that his best option after an 8 year battle with an incurable non-Hodgkin's follicular lymphoma was to have a bone marrow transplant. Just the words MARROW TRANSPLANT is enough to make you shudder.

"So, what does that mean?", we asked. Well, we will test your siblings first as they have a 25-30% chance of being your match, then we will begin searching the registry. With any luck, we will find you a donor and plan the "salvage" chemotherapy to prepare you for that transplant. My husband's only brother was not a match. So, the search on the National Marrow Donor Program (now the Be The Match Registry) began. After several months of searching with no matches, we asked why they had no luck. Well, first off, there is only about a 1% chance of finding a perfect match but for you there is also the fact that one portion of your typing is "uncommon in all ethnicities." What on earth does that mean!? That is when I began working to hold bone marrow registration drives and the reality of my own registration years ago hit me. The more I learn about the difficulty in finding "perfect matches," the more I realize how incredible this gift is to someone. We were even able to see it first-hand when a young man from our church got sick with Hodgkin's disease, a curable form of lymphoma. His body could not tolerate the chemotherapy that could save his life so the doctors gave him a transplant using his own stem cells. After only a year, his cancer came back with a vengeance. This time doctors went for an unrelated donor. This was a huge success but only because a 21 year old man from Germany registered at a marrow drive and turned out to be a perfect match. This boy is now a healthy 20 year old enjoying life as a college student. What does this have to do with me? Everything, as it is one example of what the selflessness of one individual can do to completely alter the life of another human being in such an amazingly positive way. Learn more about Doug

On Sat., June 27, 12-4 p.m., at Power Play Fitness, 6090 Campbell Road, Ste. 136, in Dallas, there will be another chance for you to heed the call to potentially save a life. A national bone marrow donor center called DKMS is teaming up with a group of Dallas residents who contacted me and asked if they could hold this marrow drive in my husband's honor. What an amazingly generous offer and one I obviously could not refuse. Registering as a bone marrow donor takes only a simple cheek swab initially and the commitment to saving a life. DKMS requires donors to be between the ages of 18 and 55 in good general health. DKMS donors are placed on the national registry.

The cheek swab is a partial tissue typing that is then listed on the national Be The Match Registry used internationally to help some 6,000 people just like us everyday search for that perfect, life-saving donor. If you come up as a partial match, the donor center will contact you to request a blood sample in order to complete the typing. If you are found to still be the perfect match, the donor center will again contact you to discuss marrow or stem cell collection. There are two ways to collect marrow. The most common method nowadays is called a Peripheral Blood Stem Cell collection (PBSC) where the donor is given a medication to boost the marrow's production of stem cells that flows over into the blood stream. After a few days, these stem cells are collected via an apheresis process, a blood draw taken from one arm, run thru a special machine to collect the stem cells, and the blood is returned into the other arm. That is it. These stem cells are then sent to the hospital where the patient is waiting to receive that gift of new life--one hopefully free of cancer.

With God’s help, we will find this one person who our family will be forever indebted to for giving Doug and I more time to grow old together and watch our daughters grow, graduate and even get married one day. These registration drives are imperative to add more people to the national registry and hopefully increasing the odds of finding life-saving matches for the thousands in need just like us, as well as educate people about how easy it is to register. It is my dream that someone like that will come to a marrow drive and be that life-saving match for my husband.