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Old Thu Dec 17, 2015, 09:03 PM
Neil Cuadra Neil Cuadra is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: Los Angeles, California
Posts: 2,553
Data,

Once a donor is identified, they must be contacted, they must agree to be tested, they must schedule and pass the tests, then agree again to donate. My wife's donor had moved to another state since signing up for the donor registry, so we were lucky that the National Marrow Donor Program reached relatives who could provide the new contact information.

Assuming you've passed your own tests, they can schedule the donation and transplant at almost any time. Our doctor said "the sooner the better" and we had no other delays.

Although they may have identified many potential donors for you, that doesn't mean that they'll all be asked, and that the first one that comes through the process will be your donor. I suspect that they contact them serially, or only a couple at a time, due to the overhead and the cost of testing. They'd start with potential donors that have the best HLA match, and perhaps select them by other factors like age and male vs. female-with-no-children vs. female-with-children.

Getting in touch with potential donors may be harder during the holidays, when so many families travel, but if I heard that somebody's life depended on me being available, I'd be there in a minute. I would never say "I'm busy - can it wait a month?" I hope other people wouldn't either.

It's great to have many potential donors, but there's only one of you, so I really hope you are found to have "all systems go".
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