This past February, after a few more blood tests to ensure I was still a healthy candidate, I began with my prep shots. For five days leading up to donation day, I was injected with filgrastim to boost the amount of blood-forming cells in my bloodstream. I didn’t feel side effects for the first two days, but began to feel tired and slightly out of breath by the third. These are normal side effects, and again are a small price to pay for the opportunity to possibly save someone’s life.
The day before donation, NMDP put me up in a hotel near the New York Blood Center (the location where I donated). I was instructed to get plenty of sleep and to eat a big breakfast before donation. Once at the Blood Center, I was escorted to a spacious donation room where two other donors were already hooked up to their blood machines.
I’m not very good with needles, so when the nurses came to hook me up I asked them to cover my arms with paper towels so I couldn’t see the two tubes. The one in my right arm extracted my blood and passed it through a machine that separates the PBSC from the rest of my blood, which is subsequently returned via a tube going into my left arm.
How long you spend hooked up depends on how many stem cells your recipient needs and how much they weigh. Typically, donors spend anywhere between four to six hours, but because my patient is twice my weight and I have particularly small veins, I was there for nine. Thankfully, the nurses were very attentive, my hospital bed had a television monitor with great programing, they gave away free snacks, and since I wasn’t able to move my arms a lot, I was lucky to have my partner feeding me said snacks as if I were a baby bird.
By the end of the day I was tired and excited to go to sleep early. I was happy donation day was behind me and excited to know that my patient would be receiving their stem cell therapy the very next day. My recovery over the next week was fine, the only thing that bothered me was that I was slightly out of breath for a few days as the effects of the filgrastim shots wore off. Most people who donate stem cells snap back almost immediately, and this felt like a very minimal price to pay.
On the one year anniversary of their treatment day, we’ll both be able to submit requests to meet one another. NMDP will then connect us if we both express the desire to meet. Personally, I’d love to meet them, but I also completely understand if they don’t feel the same. Cancer treatments and the often years it takes to complete them are exhausting, and it’s more than understandable to want to leave those days in the past and move forward.
On that initial phone call in October, my workup specialist asked me why I decided to register over 10 years ago. What I knew back then while filling out the paperwork in a booth stationed outside my university, is the same thing that I know now: It’s the right thing to do.
