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| The Gift of a Future—Donating Blood and Bone Marrow July 2008
On a regular basis, William Sax, a MITRE principal network systems and distributed systems engineer, adds a new dimension of multitasking to his life. Every few weeks, he uses his Blackberry to stay connected to the office—responding to email and making and receiving phone calls—while he donates red blood cells, platelets, and plasma at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Donating blood would make him eligible for MITRE's civic time leave, but he has not applied for it because MITRE's flexible work hours and the remote-worker-friendly infrastructure enable him to remain productive while he's at the hospital. "Thanks to the ability to work flexibly and be connected in so many different ways, there really hasn’t been a need for me to use the civic time benefit," he explains. New automated blood collection (ABC) systems enable Sax to donate platelets as often as every two weeks. The normal waiting period between whole blood donations is 56 days. With ABC, instead of giving one pint of whole blood (like a standard blood donation), a donor gives only the blood components (red blood cells, platelets, and plasma) that are needed. The unneeded components are returned to the donor, which allows for more frequent donations of platelets and plasma. The ABC donation process takes about two hours. A Personal Connection Like so many volunteers, Sax has a personal connection to his cause. In October 2007, his 8-year old daughter, Caitlin, was diagnosed with aplastic anemia and admitted for a bone marrow transplant at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Aplastic anemia is a condition that causes bone marrow to stop producing enough new red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets for the body. The adequate production of the three types of blood cells is critical to health and survival. People with severe aplastic anemia are at risk for life-threatening infections or bleeding. Caitlin's treatments included chemotherapy, five red blood cell transfusions, seven platelet transfusions, and a stem cell transplant to replace her defective bone marrow with healthy cells. Her older sister, Emma, a matched sibling, donated the stem cells for her transplant. Caitlin's new immune system continues to mature and, while her recovery is not yet full and complete, she is doing well and feeling good. During Caitlin's stay on the hematology floor, Sax saw many children with compromised immune systems who needed platelet and bone marrow transfusions. He explains he feels a sense of contribution—and a feeling of repayment—by donating blood products. "There’s a lack of awareness about the importance of donating blood products, especially platelets and bone marrow," he says. According to the American Red Cross, only five percent of the eligible population donates blood each year. Sax joined the National Marrow Donor Program Registry, a database of millions of donors, which helps doctors match patients with life-saving donors. Although patients first seek donors in their families, 70 percent of them will not find a suitable match with their relatives. "Even with a registry of millions, thousands of patients with life-threatening diseases are waiting for a suitable match," he says. "Their survival depends on new donors joining the registry." A Partner in Giving Sax's colleague, Darrow Leibner—a lead network systems and distributed systems engineer—recently joined Sax to donate platelets at the Children's National Medical Center. A regular whole blood donor, Darrow was new to the ABC collection process, but not to donating bone marrow.
He joined the National Marrow Donor Program Registry in 1996. "Joining the registry is easy. You can register by completing some online forms, they mail you a tissue-typing kit, and you send them the sample. It's painless—just a quick swab of your cheek cells." From the National Marrow Donor Program Registry's newsletter, Leibner learned about opportunities to donate bone marrow to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) clinical trials in Washington, D.C. With hundreds of open clinical trials, he quickly found one whose donor criteria he met, and he signed up. In April 2006, following a thorough physical, his bone marrow was collected, or "harvested," in an outpatient process that was conducted in the doctor's office in less than hour. Typically, to ensure the donor experiences no pain during the collection process, he or she is given either regional anesthesia, which causes loss of feeling below the waist, or general anesthesia, which puts the person to sleep. To draw the marrow out of the bone, needles are inserted through the skin over the pelvic (hip) bone and into the bone marrow. "Donating bone marrow isn't as fast as donating blood, but it's just as necessary," he says. "Knowing the impact of NIH's work made me want to help with their research. And if my [bone marrow] donation could help researchers save—or prolong—even one life, then it was worth it." —by Lisa Kiernan Related Information Page last updated: July 1, 2008 | Top of page |
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