saintmike2

When I did it (two weeks ago) they gave me filgrastin. For four days, every 12 hours, I had to give myself an injection to the stomach (into the fatty area). Pain level was minimal once you get over any fear of needles. They told me it would feel like a bee sting but honestly it wasn't even close to that.

After taking the eight injections they had to collect. For me, because my veins are pretty thin, I opted to have a central line placed. They gave me lidocaine and I felt nothing. I was talking to the doc about soccer while he did it.

After that I went to get the cells collected which took about 2 hours (the filgrastin work really well so I had a lot of cells to harvest). To collect the cells they just hooked me up to a machine that pulled blood out of one tube, took some stuff out, put some stuff in, and then returned it back to my body in another tube.

Then when they were done they took out my central line. Entire pain level for the process during and after would be a max 1 out of 10. Most people won't need a central line so it would be even easier for them. 10/10 would do again to save someone's life. Plus you get a ton of free health care in the form of all the exams they give you. Whatever is not perfect about you they will find. The inconvenience is basically one day out of work. I did it during the Chicago Polar Vortex though so everything was closed anyways so not too much of an inconvenience for me.

I just went through the procedure and from what I understand pelvic extraction is used mostly in cases where the donor is pediatric. For me the donation process only took a few hours. It was like donating plasma. The pain level was about a 0.5 out of 10. For such a life saving procedure I would've expected it to be more intense.
Also what a lot of people don't realize is that you get a a lot of free labs and tests done on you that you can send back to your Primary Care Physician. If there is something not perfect about you they will find it.

It's part of the same registry. Probabilistically if you got called up and then passed all of the screens and then were found to be the best match, you would donate via PBSC (just a needle in each arm). I think this process is rather new which is why people still think it'll be a needle to the hip. Like you, I thought it would be a pelvic donation at first. But that's really uncommon theses days. By the way, at each step they asked me if I wanted to opt out. They want to make sure that you are comfortable with the process. If you get to a point where they say they need to do it surgically for some unlikely reason, then you can opt out.

I think reddit posts like this help. Maybe buzzfeed can create a sensationalized article titled "I bet you didn't know this about bone marrow donation". But as for me, I had already decided I was going to do it and was relieved to hear that it's different from what I heard. I personally just think that when someone relates some anecdote about bone marrow donation, the image of someone jamming a needle in your hip tends to stay with you for a long time and is much more likely to be communicated. I agree with you that more people need to know that that's an outdated perception of the procedure. Even some of the staff at the hospital didn't know about PBSC.