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> Yikes! I didn't know that! Scary!

Yeh, apparently they have to kill off all the diseased marrow in the patient so that the good marrow can "take" properly. So for a while the patient will be without marrow at all.

Once that happens, apparently, the clock begins ticking, and they like the donor to be *real sure* it's a "go" because there will not be enough time to find another suitable match.

Still, the donor can chicken out at the last moment. After all, it is a freewill donation and they can't very well tie you up and take it from you against your free will.

It was one of the first things that they carefully explained when I registered back in 1991. They gave us an info pack, then sent us home to think about it and talk it over with our families. From the time you agree to become a donor, the system begins to incur costs for tests and for record-keeping -- hence the reason they like to be reasonably sure this isn't just a passing fad.

We then had to attend a second seminar a few days later to actually sign up for the first test.

Back then, the match was done in two passes, for cost reasons (the second test is quite expensive). The first test will give an indication as to whether you are a close match: if so, you're called in for a second test that goes into much closer detail.

Around about that time, they'd prefer you didn't chicken out, both from a cost point of view as well as from the point of view of setting up false hopes with a patient who will otherwise die.

I was a close match once, so they did both tests. Unfortunately, not quite close enough.

Marrow is given to the patient intraveinously, where it finds itself by magic into the right places in the bones, and re-grows. They don't need much at all, apparently: the donor has more than plenty and it grows back in a short time.

> I'm surprised the marrow registry isn't international. I just assumed if I was on a marrow registry, any doctor in the world would have access to that registry. Not so?

I was surprised, too -- when I immigrated from Canada I naturally thought that the NZ blood service could access my records automatically. Not so. I then inquired as to whether my records could be copied over from Canada to NZ -- again, not so. The Red Cross sent me hardcopies of my records and, I believe, then removed me from their system. It was felt impractical to have donors half-way 'round the world.

It then worked out that the NZ system is geared toward keeping donor records for Maori and Pacific Islanders, as opposed to the rest of us -- the donor pool for them is fairly small from a world viewpoint, whereas the donor pool in Australia for the rest of us is deemed to be adequate.

And, naturally, in any marrow transplant they will always go first to the family as the likelihood of a near-perfect match is much higher than in the "unrelated" donor community.