I was able to give some platelets and plasma today at the Stanford Blood Center. The procedure took a little more than an hour, but it got me thinking about other things that I could donate, and not suffer too much for. I ended up signing up and donating some blood for typing to the National Marrow Donor Program. Although the chance of a match is quite small, this sort of thing really makes a difference. They now have a couple ways of getting the blood stem cells (what they really want) from the body. The old way is to stick a rather large needle into your femur and extract the marrow. The new way is to chemically force out the stem cells from your bones and extract the cells using apheresis. Blood stem cells are what produce blood cells in your body. Some people don't have this or have limited capacity - as you can imagine, it is a pretty bad scene... so if you can, give some blood and think about donating blood stem cells.
Posted by torque at August 8, 2003 4:20 PM | TrackBack