I hadn’t noticed that. So the actual donation is covered by the recipient’s insurance, but the tissue testing is paid by the donor? Do I have that right?
I found a close Donor Center, in Rockville, Maryland. There doesn’t appear to be any mention of a fee on their site, though.
You’re right, dantheman. If I may, I’d like to mention some economics of the situation. You might wonder “I don’t get charged when I donate blood, so why should just signing up to be a marrow donor cost anything?”
If you donate a pint of blood, the blood bank gets a product that it can then sell to hospitals (at a hefty fee, I might add). So there is no way the blood bank would want to charge blood donors for donating, even though the blood bank has lots of laboratory fees and personnel costs associated with collecting and processing the pint of blood.
Registering as a potential marrow donor also has laboratory costs, but the registry will only be able to recoup its costs when someone is actually matched with a patient and donates. As I said in a previous post, only about 1 in 310 potential donors become actual donors.
There’s no way a registry could add the laboratory fees for 309 individuals onto the 310th volunteer who actually donates. In other words, 309 out of 310 times we don’t get a product we can sell to hospitals, whereas a blood bank gets a valuable product from every donor. (Well, almost every donor – some pints are unusable and must be tossed.)
Although we would love to have a magic wand that would eliminate the fee for registering as a potential marrow donor, the fees do ensure that a volunteer is committed to the cause and is more likely to have given serious thought to his or her decision. If registering to be a marrow donor were as easy as checking a box when you renew your driver’s license, people would do so without giving sufficient thought to what a donation actually entails. Then, if they are ever called upon to actually donate, they might find out that the donation is not really such a good idea for them after all.
We do everything we can to prevent giving patients false hope. Imaging a leukemia patient hearing that his or her search of our registry turned up five matching volunteers. But then imagine the disappointment when all five decline to donate when asked. Not a good situation, but one that we try to eliminate by having only committed volunteers on our registry.
Well, that’s reasonable. Is the Registry subsidized by the government in any way, like the American Red Cross is? I would suspect not, which would also necessitate charging donors to at least cover the cost of the tests.
Drat, there was something else I wanted to ask, and now I forget. Maybe by the time I get home.
Yes, we receive some funds from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Several people asked about the bone marrow donation itself. I’ve done it twice, two different ways, and have had the opportunity to talk to other donors, so here goes:
The “drill into your bone” harvest is now the rarer type but is still done. Happily, I was fast asleep for this, lying on my belly. I was discharged from the hospital the same day and stayed home from work for two days with a compression bandage and ice packs on my lower back. I had no long-term affects (5 years ago).
The pheresis method is now much more common. I did not have to take the stem cell medication beforehand since I was doing Leukocytes (for my previous recipient, whom I’ve met!). I hear that the medications CAN make the donor feel achy for several days before the procedure, but some I’ve talked to had no real affect. Mine took about four hours and you are fully awake/conscious but really unable to move your arms since they both have needles in them. Having a couple of good movies and nice friends around is really helpful. They also give you a valium or something to reduce anxiety.
I met donors recently, however, whose pheresis procedure took closer to EIGHT hours. One did not have good arm veins so had a central line, in through the neck/chest area. The removal of that line was very painful. Both of these marathon donors also repeated that they got some sort of tremors that made it feel like the bed was vibrating. I’m not sure if this is just a more extreme version of the tinging reaction I get when donating regular platelets (a reaction to the anticoagulant/citrate drip) or something different.
I would recommend that those who are considering being marrow donors also try plateletpheresis with the Red Cross. It helps lots of cancer patients and other conditions and will give you a sample of what most marrow donors experience today. Most pheresis procedures seem to be single-needle nowadays, but doing a marrow donation will probably require two needles and a longer procedure.
-Paul
Even the donors who had longer & more difficult procedures said they would donate AGAIN with no hesitation…
Nice to meet you, mrAru and I are both registered [through a membership drive at the submarine base in Groton a number of years ago] as possible doners.
So how did you get the job, it sounds interesting.
I’m presuming it would also transplant any immune oddity such as allergies as well, yes? So before transplant a patient might not have hayfever but have it afterwards?
Actually, that status should give you priority throughout the aviation system, from take-off through routing through landing.
I was told once that they wouldn’t take donations from someone who weighed too much. Is that true? Are there other things that disqualify a donor that people might not think of?
In my area, you can’t donate blood within a year of a tatoo, within so many weeks or day after dental work, if you’ve ever had male to male sex, etc.; so I’m guessing those might apply to marrow donations.
No question, but I want to thank you.
Several donor drives were held for a relative of mine, and over 150 new matches were found. You may have delivered one of ‘her’ donor’s donation.
I want to thank everyone who has registered and encourage everyone else to seriously consider it. How many chances do you get in life to be a hero and save a life?
(A successful match once answered about the pain of a standard extraction, “I’ve hurt myself worse walking into the edge of a table.” If I ever win the donation lottery, I’d want standard extraction.)
There IS a cost if you just walk into a Red Cross and want to be on the register; however, if you go to a drive there isn’t one (I assume that’s part of the fundraising they do for the drive.) I always wanted to get on the marrow registry because I was too skinny to give blood but didn’t want to pay for it, so I went when a sorority in town had a drive for one of their members. Of course, now I’m totally fat enough to give blood, but I still wait for the marrow people to call me. I can’t imagine not donating - seriously, people decline knowing that somebody may die if they don’t live up to their commitment?
They might be ill, otherwise no longer eligible, or have converted to a religion that does not allow tissue donation (I think).
YAY! be a match! I’ve been signed up for a year.
No questions but I work in Oncology, so our paths may have crossed, sort of. So, “Hi!”
Is there anything different about transporting bone marrow than from transporting any other kind of human tissue?