In the right place ten years later

I held off for a few weeks and waited to see what would happen.

Now, I finally have a reason to start this blog. Ten years ago I signed up to enter the HLA registry program. It is an organization that maintains a database of potential bone marrow donors. Bone Marrow is factory standard equipment that we all have and it is responsible for the production of red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets.

Anyhow I'm getting ahead of myself here. I signed up with the registry with a group of friends since a friend of one of those friends was battling leukemia and a bone marrow transplant was his best treatment option

I quickly found that the probability of being an acceptable match to donate marrow was greater than me winning a few mil in Powerball, getting struck (twice) by lightning or scoring with a really hot chick. Just not gonna happen...I thought.

The HLA registry called a few weeks back to ask if I was still interested in participating in the donor program and that there was a possibility that I was a genetic match to someone who needed a transplant. I agreed immediately and set out on the path I find myself on at this moment. At the registry's request I visited a local lab to bleed into 9 separate vials for further testing, then packed a bag and my laptop and went on vacation. I did some web surfing to learn a bit more about the process of donating marrow, talked to the people closest to me, gave a heads up to the HR people at my job and sat back to put all of this into some sort of framework I could try to comprehend and wait for the test results. I tried to keep some objectivity and emotional distance from the whole idea, at least for now. I didn't want to set myself up for a disappointment.

A few days ago I got the phone call that I had been so anxious about. The tests results on my blood samples identified me as being the best possible donor to help someone in need. Now a complicated process of more tests, conferences and (hopefully) a donation of marrow and/or stem cells to...to somebody. The rules of the game dictate anonymity for a full year. I can not know the recipient and they can not know me.

I started thinking about the Powerball analogy and how it was appropriate on so many levels. First of all, the odds are high against being a genetic match for donating to someone closely related, only about 25% of siblings are a close enough tissue match. The odds against being a match with a distant relation or someone completely unrelated are astronomical. But a dimension much deeper than the compatibility odds was the moral issue. Here I was, with a common substance in my body, standard factory equipment, that I had taken for granted all my life and after a search of the thousands, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people represented in the HLA database, my bone marrow comes up as the winner in the lottery to potentially save somebody's life. That's so much better than getting a big lottery check and a photo op. But I am still going to keep spending a couple bucks every week on lottery tickets.

You never know.

Lightning might strike twice.