Since Halloween is tomorrow and all things costumes and spooky are fair game to chat about, I think we should talk blooood – that red stuff in all of our bodies that appears blue most of the time we “see” it. Your blood could make you a superhero to someone and their family for more than one night out of the year.
You could change their lives.
Sounds dramatic? Yes, but that’s because it sounds too good to be true and in reality is a fact. It changes the course of someone’s health, which impacts all of those close to them. As someone who could have relied on transfusions, and as someone whose family member has received 2 stem cell transplants, I can say blood is magic and liquid gold.
My relationship with blood has probably very obviously gotten more intimate given my blood cancer diagnosis of PMBCL. My Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma was a blood cancer that caused cancerous cells to gather as a tumor in my chest – around the mediastinum – impacting my blood (duh), heart, lungs, thyroid and lymph nodes. Over 5 months my chemo cocktail attacked those cells, along with many of the good and tiny things that made up my blood and tissue, to very fortunately get me to this magical place called remission.
I thankfully have never required a blood transfusion or a stem cell transplant. Often times cancer patients require transfusions because chemo is beating up the body so badly that the body cannot function or replenish itself without some reinforcements. Stem cell transplants, from my very rough, non-professional understanding, are required to replace a person’s cells in order to give them back what was 100% wiped out via chemo – a much more intense and costly procedure that requires a much more specific match.
In my family member’s case, two stem cell transplants have been used to treat his AML (a leukemia) and its recurrence. His blood is now essentially that of his donor’s, and he has a new lease on life thanks to that amazing human. No one wants to think about alternatives if that superhero hadn’t registered and been found, but that is exactly the divergent effect that a donation can have! It creates a complete about-face and opens up a different world of possibilities. I wish it eliminated what is put in the rearview mirror, but we just aren’t quite there yet (a reason for a different kind of donation! yay science!).
The idea of needles is (almost) no one’s cup of tea. I’ve had my blood drawn so many times that yes, maybe I am less fearful of needles than most, but still I would love to skip them if I can! Hearing about a stem cell transplant sounds even more invasive and painful than the usual injection or blood draw, so before my diagnosis I’d never considered donating or registering as a donor. I’d imagined nights in the hospital and lots of pain in order to donate.
Turns out I was wrong! And I’m never wrong… 😉
Most stem cell donations now are done through a method similar to an extended blood donation session paired with 5 days of an injection to boost the cells your body is producing. The actual donation, called a peripheral blood stem cell collection, maaaaybe takes 4-5 hours. Zero anesthesia necessary. That’s 4-5 hours, 0 nights in a hospital, and 6 pokes to you while that can be a life-saving cure to a patient. It can literally give someone their life back, or at least give them the chance to spend more years with loved ones. That means someone has opportunities to celebrate birthdays, to travel to new places, and to complain about the weather and all of the “normal” things we take for granted every day.
Registering as a donor is obviously easier than the donation, but was even easier than I expected. If you can swab your mouth for 60 seconds then you’re good to go!
If you thought all of that was easy, then think of how easy it is to walk into the many blood donation stations that pop up in your world to donate a pint. The actual donation usually only takes about 10 min, plus some paperwork beforehand and snacking post-donation. If you need more convincing here are some stats from givingblood.org:
- About one in seven people entering a hospital need blood
- One pint of blood can save up to three lives
- Healthy adults who are at least 17 years old, and at least 110 pounds may donate about a pint of blood – the most common form of donation – every 56 days, or every two months.
Some people are not as lucky as I was though treatment. They are the faces that I associate with blood and stem cell donations now. I regret I was not as empathetic before. I wish I had donated or helped when I could. I was a mixture of too distracted, too “busy,” too uninformed, and too selfish. Hopefully I wouldn’t have shared my cancer risk factors though. Maybe it’s better I didn’t donate… But am I just making an excuse for myself? My brain digresses…
You really don’t know what you have until it is gone.
As a cancer patient, even in remission and when I hopefully make it to many years from now, I am not “healthy” enough to be a blood or stem cell donor. Being able to save someone’s life is a superpower that has been taken away from me. And while my body is a “waste” my words aren’t! So please let what I’ve shared resonate and consider being someone’s superhero and encourage those around you to do the same! Check out some of the links below