Thursday, November 3, 2011

A Note on Biological Donations.

Since getting sick, I've gotten a flood of offers from people offering blood, bone marrow, anything they can to help me out. Well, unfortunately you can't really donate blood for a specific person and the chances of you matching me out of the blue for bone marrow is pretty unreal (I thought we were playing halo...).

But the fact is I have gotten a lot of blood. I've gotten platelets, plasma, and eventually I'll get bone marrow too.

So I ask this of any of you serious about helping me with a donation. There is a website called Be The Match. I believe the way it works is that they'll send you a little package, you swab your cheek, and send it back in. You are now on the national marrow registry and if anyone out there matches you and needs marrow, you can donate your marrow (which consists of a 6 hour blood donation as they filter out the right cells. They won't actually stick a needle in your marrow like they do mine.

You can also donate:

Blood- Used to raise the hematocrit levels in very sick patients. Also helps restore blood loss from trauma damage. All you O- type out there will probably used for trauma because they don't have time to type the patient before giving them blood. But they'll probably save some for people like me because O- people can only use O- blood.

Plasma- Plasma's the stuff that your blood is without the red blood cells floating around. Plasma is actually a rich golden colour and you give it by donating blood, but then taking your cells back so they just keep the plasma. It's used to increase clotting factor in the blood. Clots (like scabs) are created by platelets, but they need certain chemicals called clotting factors in order to work properly. Which leads me to:

Platelets- Donating platelets is great because if people here get a platelet count below 10,000, they won't clot very effectively and need to get platelets. The normal range is 150,000 - 450,000.

Thank you for all your outreach and I really do appreciate the support, but trust me when I say I'm going to be fine. Finances are fine, insurance is fine, hospital care and post-hospital care are both covered as well. But there are people out there who do need this stuff, so if you are interested in helping me, please go donate. And if you don't have the time (trust me before I got sick I didn't think I'd have the time) you can still visit Be the Match, as is shouldn't take too much time and there are no needles involved.

Sincerely,
Bluwyf, Amadeus, Sarcophagus Broclergaard

2 comments:

msp said...

You are my hero!!!

Baker said...

Will do. Thanks for the info. You rock!