Understanding the donor registration process
We made it clear in our post announcing our first donor registration drive, that the process of signing up is entirely painless. Further, the process of donation, though somewhat time-consuming, is fairly painless.
The process is similar to the apheresis procedure you may have seen for platelet donation.
Here is a short video that explains the procedure:
Note that you will only be called in for the actual donation if a match with a patient is found. This match may be found at any time in the future. Therefore, we require that you remain a committed donor till the age of 55.
If you have any doubts, you should get them clarified by the co-cordinator at the venue. Feel free to ask those doubts over email, if you prefer, at marrow@mumbaikar.me or over Twitter, at @MumbaikarME. If your doubts persist, we ask that you do not proceed with the registration at that point. We will conduct donor registration drives in the future and you can attend those when your doubts are clarified.
Donor Eligibility
In order to sign up as a donor, you must meet the following two conditions:
- You must be between the ages of 18 and 55.
- You must be void of
- Hepatitis
- AIDS
- Any other serious blood disorder
Donor Sign-up Process
When you come in to sign up as a donor, here is what will happen:
- You will attend an awareness session where the above video will be shown to you. After this, you can ask any questions you have. Only once all doubts have been clarified here, will you proceed to the next step.
- You will fill out an application form. Please ensure that your contact information is filled in with as much detail as possible, since it will be required for the registry to contact you quickly should a match ever be found.
- You will then read and, upon agreement, sign a form consenting to this process.
- Finally, we will proceed to the actual buccal swab, which involves rubbing sterile cotton swabs against the inner sides of your cheeks, at various points. This step should only take about a minute or two.
- Once you're done with the buccal swab, you will put the cotton swabs in an envelope (which we will provide) and give it over to us. We'll take care of sending all samples over to the registry for the HLA typing.
The Donation
Should a match ever be found (and I stress, this may happen at any time in the future, not necessarily right after the genetic typing is carried out), here is what will happen:
- You will be contacted and informed that a patient has matched you.
- There will be confirmatory HLA typing process, using a vial of blood from the donor.
- A medical pre-screening test will be carried out for the donor. We will ensure that your health is taken care of- we do not want to improve the health of one person by degrading he health of another.
- You will be asked to come in for a growth factor injector (Neupogen) once a day, every day, for 5 consecutive days. This will boost the yield of peripheral blood stem cells by stimulating the donor's (healthy) bone marrow to produce more stem cells.
- On the fifth day, you will come in for an apheresis procedure, where blood will be extracted from one arm, be processed immediately to remove the excess stem cells, and be put back into your body through the other arm. This can take upto 4 hours, but is a fairly comfortable process (you will likely just be watching TV through all this).
Note that this is not at all like that painful classical bone marrow extraction process that you may have heard of. None of the donors who sign up will ever be called in for that.
To summarize, here is a slideshow that explains what we will be doing at the donor registration drive:
