What if you had a life-threatening disease that was readily treatable through a transplant procedure, yet you can’t be treated because no suitable donor could be found? What if a loved one were in that position? Ira Riklis can tell you that, sadly, that’s the situation faced by many with diseases like leukemia and aplastic anemia. Though treatable by bone marrow transplants, donors can only be found for 30 percent of those people.
By registering as a potential donor, as Ira Riklis has done, you can help even those odds. Really there’s not much to it. You contact a national registry to sign up and send in a simple cheek swab so they can test and match your tissue type. From there, it’s a matter of waiting for a call that will likely never come. It’s much harder to match tissue for this type of transplant than it is to match blood types. The odds of a match are small, which makes it all that much more important that as many people as possible sign up.