Quiet Hero

A few months ago Don and I signed up to be on the National Bone Marrow Registry because of a young girl in our area who has leukemia and needs a match for a bone marrow transplant.

Don received a call about a month ago saying that he matched someone else here in the United States. They asked if he would be willing to be a donor, and he said he would.

The process involved repeated interviews, questions, and vials and vials of blood that they tested. They gave him some very expensive injections which caused his body to make millions of stem cells more than it would normally have done. The injections amounted to two shots in the stomach each day for five days. The first set of shots had to be done in a Phoenix hospital so that if Don had a bad reaction to the medication they would be able to help him. He handled it fine, so we drove home. The rest of the shots were given here at home by a nurse. They left him very tired and his bones ached, but he handled it all cheerfully.

Last Sunday night we drove back to Phoenix to settle into a hotel. The actual donation began very early Monday morning. That's when we hit the first glitch. The nurses struggled to get a catheter into a vein in his arm. On the fourth try they were able to get one in, but they had to use a vein that is normally used for the actual stem cell donation. Consequently, they had to send Don up to another floor where they inserted an eight-inch-long catheter into his jugular vein in his neck and stitch it in place. That was a little bit scary, but it worked out OK.

They hooked him up to a machine that took his blood out, spun it in a centrifuge, sucked out the middle layer where the stem cells are, and put the rest of the blood back into his body. It took several hours. All in all, it was a LONG day. We were able to come home on Tuesday, and Don has been resting ever since--trying to let his body recuperate.

Today he went back to work, but he'll only be doing desk work. He hopes to have enough energy to play soccer tomorrow night...we"ll see.

These are the nurses struggling with his veins.



The last set of shots.




Hooked up to the machine and happy to finally get something to eat! You can see blood oozing from the hole in his neck where the catheter was. It's still bruised but healing and scabbed over as of today. I'm just glad that the oozing has stopped.




Passing the hours watching DVDs...thanks, Rick and Denise, for loaning us your DVD player.





I watched what Don went through over the last many days trying to help someone he doesn't even know, and I felt so much admiration for him. He's a good man with a big heart, and I love him! I also realize that he is part of a quiet army of heroes who give of themselves so unselfishly in order to help someone else. So many quiet heroes...and Don is one of them.