now what?! (brought to you by tramadol)

I don't know if this is normal or not, but sitting around mostly immobile after this bone marrow procedure has me kind of obsessed over what happens next. I suppose it must be normal. I mean, for the past two weeks, I've been preparing for this extraction to happen. Now it's over, and poof! I have no idea of how Little Man is doing. And I'm not even allowed to know until three months in. Unless he doesn't make it. So I keep looking up survival rates for bone marrow transplants, and how HLH patients respond to BMTs, because I don't have anything else to do but sit here all jacked up on painkillers with ice on my back.

I keep finding all these resources about transplants and HLH, but don't want to post them on Facebook. I post enough crap on Facebook as it is, and I really don't want people interpreting it as some kind of pathetic attention grab because I did this good thing (I used to be friends with that girl, and she sucks).

So on the off-chance you're interested in information about bone marrow transplants or hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH, duh), I'm going to stick all of the really interesting stuff I find right here in this post.

Also, I have a clone. I repeat, I have a tiny person out there with my DNA who is my motherflipping clone. Whiskeytangofoxtrot.

Anyway, links:
HLH: A Simple Description - This whole Web site is an account of a little girl named Zoe's (winning!) battle against HLH (and we all know how much I love a Zoe).
The Histiocytosis Research Trust - "The prognosis for children with HLH has improved dramatically over the last 20 years and there is now a cure rate of more than 50%."
Thoughts One Year After Donating Bone Marrow Stem Cells - I had to have my bone marrow extracted directly from my pelvic bone, but other donors (like Ruth) are able to donate the stem cells that create bone marrow.
What Is It Like to Give? - From an awesome, now-defunct Web site called Sepia Mutiny. The site highlighted a few campaigns encouraging South Asians to register for the marrow registry; with only 1% of registry members of South Asian ancestry, South Asians have just a 1 in 20,000 chance of finding a match.

because I felt like it

That's right. I ate two Filet-o-Fish sandwiches in one sitting. Yeah, I'm gluten intolerant.

But I figure if these painkillers are going to make me sleepy, itchy and cranky anyway, I might as well be those things and full of Filet-o-Fish.

So suck on that, body. I do what I want.

officially a donor

Yesterday, I donated bone marrow to a newborn with a rare blood immunodeficiency. I'm still pretty overwhelmed by the whole experience. I'm in awe that somewhere in the world is a tiny little boy who is fighting to live - and he has my DNA inside his body to help him now. There's a tough little mini-me out there, and all I want him to do is live.

The procedure wasn't painful - minus the sore throat left over from the anesthesiologist's breathing tube, and the pretty intense constipation - I was asleep for the whole thing, which took less than an hour. I am drowsy from the painkillers, and sore. I feel like I fell down a flight of icy stairs and bruised my butt and lower back.

I despise IVs more than anything else I've ever encountered.

One of my kids gave me a card and made me promise not to open it until after the procedure :)

Awake, but still heavily anesthetized, on morphine, and very confused by "KGC." This is also the most unattractive photo ever taken of me, so of course I had to include it here.

And I would absolutely do it again.

I can't run for two weeks while I recover. The doctor says that any kind of over-exertion too soon will cause the puncture holes in my pelvic bone to "connect the dots" and cause a fracture. So I'm counting down the days until I can put my Asics back on, and focusing my energy on fundraising while I wait.

I'm also praying. I'm not huge on prayer, because I'm not convinced God cares about what happens to us. But just in case It does, I want to give my patient, my Little Man, the best chance he can possibly have to survive and thrive. So it'd be nice if you'd pray for him, too.

I'm donating bone marrow tomorrow morning, and I'm terrified.

I'm a match!

About a year ago, I signed up for the Be the Match Registry. I'm lucky to count a few cousins among my best friends, and one of those cousins has battled sickle cell anemia his whole life. I figured that I would be proactive and sign up now, so that I'd be established in the system as a potential match the next time he had a big health scare.

Luckily, he's spent the last year in fantastic health. So imagine my surprise when the week before Christmas, I got a phone call and an email asking me to contact the registry immediately. Be the Match had identified me as a potential match for a newborn baby boy fighting HLH (hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis), a rare immunodeficiency that almost exclusively affects infants and young children.

"Are you still interested in being a bone marrow donor?" they asked.

"What the hell kind of person says no when they find out they might be a match?" I replied.

So the day after Christmas, I slogged up the highway in slushy, snowy rain to have blood drawn, the next step in ascertaining if I might be an actual match for this little guy. I cracked jokes with the phlebotomist about that time I punched a nurse in the face for trying to stick an IV needle in my arm without warning; she confided that she feels the same way at the dentist's office. For the whole drive home, I prayed that I would be the willing match this baby boy needed. When I got home, I promptly forgot, as life went on.

On Wednesday, Nick and I went on a grueling hike of eight miles of the Appalachian Trail. We camped overnight on top of a mountain; after I survived through the night, cold and sleepless but very much alive, I felt unstoppable as I marched back down the mountain. I got home to celebrate my sister's 24th birthday with sushi. I climbed into my bed after dinner for a sleep so deep that I didn't even notice when my phone rang this morning.

When I woke up, I listened to the voicemail from Susan from Be the Match. As I called back I knew. Susan confirmed it. I am the match for the newborn baby boy. My bone marrow is the cure that he and his family need. I enthusiastically told Susan that yes, I was still interested.

"First, we need to make you aware of what the procedure entails," she began.
"Do you mean how painful it is?"
"Well," she waffled.
"It can't hurt worse than having your baby die because a donor match said no," I shot into the void she left empty.
"OK. I'll put your information packet in the mail overnight then, so we can get your consent form signed ASAP," she responded.

I've spent the last several hours overwhelmed by what is coming next. I am so humbled - so God damn blown away - that out of the billions of people in this world, I am the match for a tiny baby boy, a child his parents have hung all their love and hope and dreams upon. I'm in shock that after wanting nothing more for my whole short life than to make other people's lives better, I have the opportunity to literally save a life. I am going to save a child's life. Not figuratively or metaphorically. Not as a teacher. I am going to keep a kid from dying. I'm just as blown away by the fact that for a pretty adamantly child-free person, I have this overwhelming desire to hold this little boy in my arms and look at him for hours, because we'll be linked to one another in a way that no one else in the world will ever be.

I'm clearly still processing this. But I'm so... moved by the opportunity to do this for another person that I just don't know what to do with myself.