Every Day is Marne Gras

On August 5th or 6th I am slated to bring early Chanuka tidings to a nice stranger lady living somewhere with cancer. I’m giving her one thousand and ninety (mls? tiny units of some kind? whatever) little units of my bone marrow because she has leukemia and I do not.

In preparation, I will receive a physical, including a chest x-ray and an EKG and infectious disease screening in order to make sure I am healthy enough to donate and that my anatomical gift is not biologically yucky. She will have high dose chemotherapy and then full body radiation to empty her body of what is presently killing her (which, presently, is just about everything) and she will try her very hardest to not die while my stem cells find their way from Seattle to wherever she is and attempt to graft themselves up in her business.

I got involved with the National Marrow Donor Program the way I imagine many people do: I was killing time in between afternoon appointments. I was walking sloooowly across the Oberlin campus, considering wandering through the mailroom again when I saw a cluster of earnest-looking women standing behind a table covered in brightly-colored schwag, apparently handing out free stuff. I walked over, and behold: I could have a free lollipop if I gave them a cheek swab! Awesome.

I would probably never get a phone call, they told me, but they handed me several packets of information regarding how the whole program works, what would happen if I did get called, and how to update them for the rest of my life with my contact information. I swabbed away, convinced I was swabbing wrong and they would probably just throw my sample out after I left, and thanked them for my nice, new glossy packets (which I read on the way to my next appointment), and that was it.

Fast forward some years. I apparently gave the NMDP my end-of-the-world e-mail address.  It’s the one I never, ever use, but incidentally, the only e-mail address I know I will never delete, an AOL account I’ve had since I was fifteen that I clean out once a month or so. It’s the only knickknack I own.  I hold onto it for nostalgia.  This is the e-mail account I created when I wanted to surf the internet without my high school boyfriend being able to talk to me online; it was my secret e-mail, my first weapon of resistance.

When it happened I didn’t even get a call when it happened (though I tell people about “the call” when I describe the process so far because it sounds so much more dramatic and exciting than “when I got the e-mail”).

I am deleting the same old trash I delete every month from my AOL account: assimilationist crap from the HRC, 10% off of nothing from Babeland, something about my Friendster account (Facebook, you know how this ends), and there on my screen is a terse subject heading: “Bone Marrow Donor Program”.

I love opening spam in the hope that it is not actually spam, so I opened it, rather than sending it to recently deleted AOL hell. I thought it was a reminder that I was still in their database, and would I please verify my contact information. I thought it was the donor program finally telling me that I had swabbed incorrectly and they had to junk my specimen.

Wrong. Our records indicate that you may be a potential match for a patient.

Please contact us right away if you are still interested in becoming a donor.

I thought it was a joke. For the uninitiated: there are over seven million people in the NMDP registry, and there are even more folks registered elsewhere. There are barely a few thousand matches made in the US each year. The pacific northwest/seattly area makes around 40. You have a much better chance of getting into Harvard; it is similarly probable to getting Ed McMahon to come to your house during the superbowl with a big check and balloons.

But say you do get an e-mail, like me. This is what it means: someone out there has an HLA type (that’s science talk for something geneticky) that matches yours enough based on your preliminary sample that you gave them X years ago as you were dawdling to your meeting with your Women’s Studies advisor that they want to test you out further to see exactly how good of a match you are.

If you’re still into the idea of giving it up for a stranger, the next thing you will do is answer a lot of questions about your health over the phone. I experienced the joy of the phone screening while shopping for my New Zealand backpack in the REI. While I was being ignored by the entire sales staff, I sat in the corner next to the clearance daypacks and assured the phone screener that I was pretty sure I did not have mad cow disease.

She did not think I was very funny. It probably would not have worked out well between us. You know, sexually.

If there is nothing especially infectious about you (and, you know, you’re not, gasp, a gay man or African, because if you are, then you’re out, you walking vessel for AIDS, you). you get to go give them more samples. You are in a contest now with some other potential donors to see who is the healthiest and who mostly closely genetically resembles the potential recipient. There might be quite a few people in the running, but there might not be.

I don’t like needles. Puncture wounds make me faint, no matter how small. Every time I have had something pierced (what was it about being nineteen that made me think “I should poke lots of holes in my face”?) and every time I have had to give blood, I have passed out. When I had my labret (chin) pierced, I passed out twice. I refused to share this tidbit, though, with the blood technicians who have taken my samples so far; instead I just told them that I really enjoy elevating my feet and drinking apple juice while undergoing medical procedures. They think I am a riot. I don’t want anyone there to know how physically challenging this whole business is for me.

Anyway, after they take more blood from you, you wait.  You have somewhere around a 10-15% chance of receiving another phone call from the program. This one is actually a phone call, and it is “the” phone call:

“Guess what? You’re the best match for our patient. Would you like to be the donor?”

The woman who called me was elated; clearly the highlight of her day.

I got the call from this happy, happy woman while I was on vacation in Arizona; at that moment I was an hour deep into trying to make our dead campstove come back to life.  I was cursing at a piece of rusty tin in a hostel parking lot when we connected.

“Holy shit”, I offered. “Can I call you back, in like, a week?”. They were not especially thrilled, but after I promised them that I would call them back when I got home, they acquiesced and I got back to playing cub scout.

So fast forward again three weeks; here I am now, rushing through blood tests and consultations and examinations so I can get this bone marrow stuff out of my body and into hers before her cancer kills her.

Her name isn’t Linda (although I guess it could be). They can’t tell me her name– I’m only allowed to know her sex, her age, and her diagnosis. I started calling her Linda, though, because I thought it would be helpful when talking about this whole process to other people to use a name instead of “the recipient” or “the lady I’m donating for”.

Or that was my logic. But now I’ve become attached to Linda, like the way farmers do when they can’t help naming their livestock names like Buttercup and Snowflake instead of just tagging them with serial numbers. Not to make slaughtering metaphors while talking about a stranger lady’s cancer, but you try slaughtering something named Snowflake.

Okay, not a perfect metaphor. Moving on.

But since they won’t give me the idea person to latch on to, I’ve started creating her for myself. I think about this Linda character a lot. I wonder what she’s doing today, how she’s feeling, if she’s scared. I decided she lives in Detroit, and that she’s an old school butch dyke. I think she’s a welder. She drinks bud light while she watches the L word on Sunday nights. When she gets done with this cancer thing, she’s going on an Olivia cruise like she always meant to. She’s a reformed catholic. She wants to be cremated and spread over Lake Michigan because she used to go fishing there with her dad in summertime.

At first it was practical to call her Linda. And then it was cute. And then it was fun, like a game. But now I realize how hard I am trying to turn Linda into 1. the right kind of cancer patient and 2. someone who isn’t me. Everyone wants to donate to someone who is taking all of the right steps to get rid of their cancer, who is thinking the right thoughts, who does important good things in life, who is a good person who really, really, really needs this transplant. And everyone wants to donate to someone who bears no resemblance to them, because frankly, it’s really easy to drown in thinking that you can just easily wind up on the other end of this confidentiality agreement. She could be my mother or my sister. She could heal and then I could get cancer and die.

In six months we’re allowed to make contact (if things went okay and I haven’t been hit by a bus yet), no gifts. And if she’s lucky and she makes it, and she wants to, we’re eventually allowed to meet. I don’t feel especially tied to the idea of finding out what happens after my part is all over, and I don’t know if I’ll ever ask how it went for Linda. She will die without the transplant, but she has about a 40% of surviving the next two or three years with it.

Anyway, Linda, maybe you’re out there right now. And maybe your name isn’t Linda. Maybe its Shirley Jane. I hope you’re doing alright in the last few days before they start bombarding you with chemo. I hope you’re enjoying your morning coffee and blogroll. I don’t have much to say, except I hope that things go well for you and I so hope that you will wake up in a few weeks when this is all over and you will feel a little more sarcastic and a little more New Yorky and a little more farmy because hopefully my sarcastic, New Yorker, farmy bone marrow will be multiplying like crazy all up in you. I don’t pray, but if I did, I would pray for you, but I don’t believe in prayer; I believe in blogs and words and being funny when it counts, so trust that if I could be hanging out with you right now, we would probably be laughing up a storm, watching the fifth season of sex and the city or sitting in a public place somewhere making fun of all the ugly people who walk by us with their ugly babies. I would probably spend the afternoon trying to get you drunk and you would practically piss yourself at my antics, you wouldn’t even realize that they were antics and that I was trying to make you forget about what is going on for you right now. You would probably just think that you had a terrific, funny friend, and you wouldn’t even mind that I was trying to be cheery, because you know that I balance being cheery with knowing damn well what’s about to happen to you. But they won’t let me do that, and that’s probably a good idea, because my friends who know me know that I’m a little crazy in the noodle… so I just wrote this thing for you instead.