A Medical Diagnosis for Cancer of the Blood or HLH gets a New High-Tech Cure
There's been an inspiring development in medicine; and here is how it goes. Let's say there's someone out there who's received a very serious medical diagnosis. The person needs help from someone who is in a position to extend it. The new development allows just about anyone to find out about who needs the help they can provide, and to lend a hand at little cost to themselves. Take the case of a Hispanic family in Miami; about four months ago, they rejoiced at having a healthy little baby girl, the first child they had, that they could start a family with. When the baby was about a couple of months old, inexplicably one day, she began to burn up with a very high fever. Her parents took her to a hospital nearby, where after a bunch of complex tests, they received a medical diagnosis that she had a very rare disease of the blood called HLH. The baby's parents discovered that there were all kinds of other children who had diseases of the blood, leukemia for instance, and all they needed to recover, were a few healthy marrow cells from any donor who could spare them, who would be a match.
If you are thinking that donating bone marrow to strangers sounds pretty painful and time-consuming, that's where you need to be told about the new development. This is how it works. When you show up to be tested for matching traits, the lab people swab a few cells out of your inner cheek, and test the cells to see what kind your bone marrow is likely to be. Whatever kind it turns out to be, they store the information in a registry on Getswabbed.com. Anyone can register and have a volunteer come by to pick up a sample. They also conduct bone marrow collection drives at schools and public places from time to time. When people learn of this procedure, entire neighborhoods sometimes turn out to "getswabbed". Sometimes, their marrow type happens to be a great match for some poor soul somewhere in the country with a medical diagnosis of cancer or HLH, looking to be lent a hand.
Once someone learns that they are a match, they can look forward to some pretty impressive high-tech medical wizardry performed on them. Gone are the days when donors needed to brace themselves to have a long scary looking needle drilled into their bone so that a sample could be removed. All they do now is, they give you a drug that tends to get the marrow cells needed to concentrate in the blood. After a week, the lab just takes out a little blood, harvests the cells from the blood, and puts the blood back into you. They take it out one arm, and put it back in the other. It's that simple. The only problem is that there are lots of ethnic groups that don't really show up to be registered on getswabbed that much. People who belong to those groups who come to need this kind of treatment often return disappointed. A fatal medical diagnosis no longer has to be serious, with this revolutionary technology. People just need to come forward.
A good way to do this would be, to recruit people for swabbing when anyone shows up to donate blood. Blood is usually far more in demand; you don't need an exact match with blood. Blood can be separated into its constituent parts, and separated plasma can be donated to anyone. Marrow cells though, need to be an exact match; if people don't volunteer, there's pretty much little else to do. When parents receive a medical diagnosis for a child that points to a serious disease, the anguish they go through is something other people have the power to believe. It just takes a little pin prick, and a little blood drawn. Now who would deny a parent that?