happenstance

hi, 

i am the second best match in terms of bone marrow for this sixteen year old girl with leukemia.

which i think is absolutely nuts. not only for the chances— that would be difficult to calculate but they’re undoubtedly quite high— but just circumstantial stuff. in senior year of high school i was in this leadership/alcohol drug awareness/confusedish group that had small groups create and initiate some sort of community service thing together. and somehow my partner and i got around to volunteering at this bone marrow registry, to help a five year old boy with cancer try to recruit more people (especially minorities) into registering. maybe this isn’t such a nutty chain of events. but i kinda think so.

bone marrow donations tend to ride along (incredibly specific) ethnic lines, and the majority of the people in the registry are currently caucasian. because of this, caucasian people have about a 70-80% of being matched with a donor. if you’re a minority, it’s much lower.  [disclaimer: i feel like whenever you talk about discrepancies between ethnicities you enter this state of commenting upon the subtle oppressive racial structures in this world, but this honestly is by no fault of anything like that. it makes sense because america is majority white, but doesn’t mean that it still won’t suck to be a minority with cancer and have a significantly less chance of being matched to a donor]

but yeah. i was seventeen then so i didn’t register, but did after my birthday.

i think that if the first donor has whatever issues in donation and i do go through with this (parental issues), i’m going to give a heads up to anybody that had a part in the circumstances of all this

and in light of circumstances… you should register. seriously. who knows, you might be a match.

also, i’m proud of myself. finally a post that isn’t about missing home or some form of nostalgia, i’m a baby