Blood and Bone Marrow donating 411...

Hi there everybody,

Victoria and I are so thrilled by the wonderful support you have provided in response to our request for help. Thank you so much for writing us and stepping up to support us during this challenging time for both Victoria and I.

There are two blood products that Victoria needs throughout the next stages of her treatment for Leukemia (AML). She needs blood donors to give her platelets and/or red blood cells. UCSF maintains a Blood Center that provides the hospital with blood products that will be used for her treatments. The Blood Center is located at the Parnassus, and they are open Monday through Friday 8am to 7pm and Saturday 9am to 4pm. Here are directions, further details about the center, and information about donating blood:

http://pangloss.ucsfmedicalcenter.org/bloodcenters/bclocationspage.htm

It is quite possible that you will need to donate your whole blood so they can confirm if you are an eligible to give blood and/or platelets to Victoria. We will not be aware of any blood testing results if you happen to be ineligible – this information will be kept private from us and is only shared between you and the Blood Center staff. If you have never donated blood or have not donated blood in the past year I would suggest you do this step first very soon.


Platelet Donation:

Victoria needs platelets. Platelets can be donated to Victoria regardless of your blood type. Platelets can only be stored for five (5) days so the need for donations is vast and continuous. As you can realize timeliness is really important, so Victoria’s Nurse Coordinator will be arranging the days that we would need for you to donate your platelets. Platelets can be donated every two (2) weeks. The procedure takes anywhere from 70 minutes to two (2) hours.

For more information please see the UCSF Blood Center website at:

http://pangloss.ucsfmedicalcenter.org/bloodcenters/bcgeneralinfopage.htm


Red Blood cell donation:

The UCSF Blood Center always needs people to donate blood. It’s a wonderful gift you can give anybody who is in need either because of Illness or injury. But if you wish, you can donate your blood specifically for our illustrious patient, Victoria Wallach. Victoria’s blood type is O-positive therefore she can only accept blood from people with blood type O-positive and O-negative. She can accept platelets from anybody with any blood type as long as their blood is eligible as mentioned in the previously. The donation process could take only 30 minutes.

For more information please see the UCSF Blood Center website at:

http://pangloss.ucsfmedicalcenter.org/bloodcenters/bcgeneralinfopage.htm


Bone Marrow Donations:

If you have an interest in donating your bone marrow you are welcome to contact National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) at http://www.marrow.org and/or call 1-800-MARROW2. I don’t have information on how to designate your marrow to a specific patient, but I did find an interesting link on the NMDP website at:

http://www.marrow.org/DONOR/donor_faqs.html#specific

Our doctor and UCSF medical staff are currently researching the NMDP database for people who genetically match Victoria. If you have an interest in seeing if you are a match for Victoria then you would already need to be in the database. Entering yourself in the database would give a wonderful gift perhaps to an anonymous person in great need. UCSF does have a bone marrow donor program to collect bone marrow. Please contact the UCSF Blood Center for more details; the link is above.

More Questions:

Please do not hesitate to get in touch with us if you have more questions - [email protected]

Love,
Noah