A bone marrow transplant is for life

if it is successful. 

I don't know that much about them but I do know they are an important, indeed vital, part of modern medicine. I have grappled to understand them and the vocabulary which surrounds them to help medical professionals do aid work. I have heard doctors and researchers talk about the need for them.

At the back of my mind at all times has been the thought of the patients who need them. This morning's paper really brought the need for such transplants home.  A family here has young twin boys, their only children, and both the children need bone marrow transplants to survive. The boys have something called "hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis" or "HLH" for short.  It is an inflammatory disease and very, very painful. 

The family and their medical team are looking for a donor, a donor who matches the needs of their boys. They only need one donor because the boys are "identical" twins.  Obviously the point of the story is to try and find a healthy, matching donor - one between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. I hope they do...and that is all I can really do. I am too old to go in and say, "Am I a match?" I don't have millions to donate to research about that and so many other things.  

And then I started thinking about other things. This is a story in the paper, a paper a lot of people will not read. The word needs to be spread. Doctors need to start talking to patients who could be potential donors. The media needs to do more to inform the general population about how to go about registering and what is involved. Employers need to tell their staff, "If you are a potential donor then you get paid time off to donate." The government needs to do much more about widening the potential donor register. 

All those things are not that expensive in themselves. The process to save two young lives is much, much more expensive but it is also something we cannot put a price on.

If you are reading this then, wherever you live, please put the word out to the healthy young. It may not save the life of these twins, although hopefully it might, but it may save other lives.  

  hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH)