SimilarYellow

My brother actually donated bone marrow a few years ago, so here goes if you're interested:

He registered in 2015, the second he turned 18. I'm not sure what prompted this because as a family, we had never come into contact with needing any kind of medical donation (not even blood). But anyway, he did it.

About six months later, he gets a call that he's a tentative match and that if he'll consider it, they'll send him a test kit. He had to take that kit to his primary care provider. They basically just needed more blood samples to build a full DNA profile.

A few weeks later they call him and tell him that he's a match. He's told that at this point, the potential recipient knows nothing about him being a match so if he wants to back out he can. My brother agrees to being a donor, but he's still cautioned again that if he agrees and they go to kill the patient's immune system, the patient will likely die if my brother decides to back out after all. You can - at any point - withdraw consent to donate your bone marrow. I thought that was insane, you're asked so often if you want to donate or not. If you agree and they mess with the patient, I think you should be bound to do it (unless somehting medical prevents you obviously).

Anyway, about a month after that his doctor gets a package with medication that needs to be administered. My brother gets two weeks off (paid obviously, we're in Germany). One week before the donation and one week after. You get one week before because the medication sends your bone marrow into overdrive and causes flu like symptoms in some people. My brother was completely fine though!

He had to get to the hospital for donation the evening before and they did a lot of tests to ensure that he was healthy and that everything was going to plan. The next day, he's hooked up to a machine. His blood ran through that machine and it extracted bone marrow basically. In the evening, the doctors checked if they had enough bone marrow. If they hadn't had enough, my brother would have had to come back the next day but that wasn't necessary.

Basically he goes home and that's that. His employer could have reclaimed the money they paid for his time off from the organization that manages bone marrow donation I think, but they chose not to because it's good press.

Last we heard the recipient was doing reasonably well after the donation. He had some skin issues if I remember correctly. He decided he didn't want to be in contact with my brother so we don't know how he's going now.

This was probably more than you wanted to know but there you go, lol.

Fuck America’s healthcare system. Way to go Germany.

Yeah I do often feel sad about how that's handled for you guys.

Interestingly, my boss needed a bone marrow transplant last year and there were three matches, all in the US. Whoever ended up donating saved my boss's life at a much greater personal cost/more effort than a German donor would have had to go through, so major props for that!

How rad of your brother!

Right?! He's just like "Oh you know, anyone would do it!" but that's not true. People are often scared, thinking their bone marrow will be extracted from the thigh bone or something (and sometimes that's still done, tbf) but it doesn't have to be that way.

I have some in-laws who rolled the 25% die 3 times and had a child with Hurlers Syndrome twice. This was years ago when there weren't options available.

Did they not realize the chances of having more sick kids or were they just hoping the kids wouldn't be sick and were willing to risk it? Considering how bad Hurlers Syndrome is that seems pretty irresponsible to risk that, only because you want to have more kids.

I'm reminded of that surrogate mother who wanted her kid back. I still feel kinda weird that they just terminated the rights she had to the child she gave birth to. Reading that, I'm glad surrogacy is not allowed in Germany, despite the good it may bring in some cases.