There’s an ongoing life-and-death drama that plays out invisibly to all but a few. Each day, 3,000 people search the bone marrow transplant registry looking for matching donor who can help save their lives. But, as Ira Riklis knows, most of those people will fail in their search. Matching bone marrow’s nowhere near as easy as matching blood types for transfusions. In fact, any given one of us has just a 1 in 20,000 chance of matching a stranger who desperately needs bone marrow.
Add to that the fact that still relatively few people have signed up to be on the national bone marrow registry, and it becomes harder still to find a match. That’s why Ira Riklis has made it a point to register as a potential donor and urges others to do so as well. Chances are he, or you, will never be called. But it’s nice to know that just maybe you’ll have a chance at some unexpected time to become the hero who saves the life of another.