Last fall, I was surprised at Stitches East by my friends Deb and her daughter Kate presenting me with this pair of lace socks that they had knit together, one doing the feet, the other the tops, so that the differing gauges wouldn’t matter. They’re glorious socks in my favorite shade of maroon, and the three of us spent I don’t know how long together, laughing till we ached. After years of exchanging emails with Deb, and then with Kate, it was such a treat to come together like that and to really hit it off like we’d been so sure we would. We did. And how.
Shortly thereafter they got hit with the first of the out-of-the-blue news. The followup now is that Deb’s son and Kate’s brother Robbie is in need of a bone marrow donor for his leukemia, and he needs it like, now, and there is no good match in the registry yet. Here is Robbie’s dad’s blog, a mix of work and their current situation.
I checked, and I’m not eligible to even try to sign up. Given that I’m waiting for the trials at Stanford to progress so I can sign up of lupus patients’ receiving blood stem cell transplants from their adult siblings, this is hardly a surprise.
Here is a list of FAQs on the bone marrow donations. It can be a lot more gentle a process than it used to be: it is often done now like a simple blood donation. Speaking of which, and speaking as a parent with a child also in need at times of platelet transfusions–Robbie needs them far more often, though–the supply in the blood banks is real low right now; if you donate platelets, the process takes longer, but you can do it more often than whole blood because they return the non-platelet parts back to you.
Picture yourself, ten years from now, twenty years from now, knowing that you’d saved a life. Maybe even getting to see a little of what that person did with that life to thank you for the one gift higher than any other that one human being can give to another.
How many hours of your days can you spend that well?
