Oregon State University issues Be The Match Campus Challenge Against Blood Cancer

Undergraduates at Oregon State University held a donor drive on their campus in Corvallis last month:

More than 120 students joined the National Bone Marrow Registry with the easy, quick, painless, no-cost act of sitting down at a table on the quad and getting their cheeks swabbed.

That simple act may have amazing reverberations — any time in the next 20 years that someone gets sick with blood cancer, an OSU student will be checked to see if their blood markers match.  If and when these students’ swabs match up, they can give the gift of life to someone in desperate need.

If you watch the video above, you’ll notice that OSU students are challenging other campuses across the nation to do better, to top OSU in its donor count. Has your school organized a bone marrow donor drive yet?  If not, check out the Be The Match on Campus website, which has all the links and resources you need to set up a donor drive on campus.  You can do it — and it works!  Check out these amazing stats.  Through the new Be The Match on Campus program, college students have:

• raised $53,063 to support the National Bone Marrow Registry
• added 4,111 new people to the registry as potential donors
• generated 86 actual bone marrow donations already!

Add your energy to this wave of generosity.  Give of yourself.  Help others learn about the gift of a bone marrow match for people suffering from blood cancers.  Grab a friend, head online, and get a Be The Match on Campus chapter started at your college or university today.

#OregonState #BeTheMatch

Better Get a Snap

Tracy was frosting a birthday cake for our son this week; he’s turned 16.  She put care into it, picking out colors, fashioning a rainbow, adding little dots here and there on top of a generous layer of chocolate.  As she finished, I pulled her camera out and said, “Wait.  I’d better get a picture of you and the cake before it’s all eaten up.”  “Why? I mean, it’s just…” she began.

A pause.  A mutual glimpse.  Understanding.  Then she nodded as I said the words, “you might not be here for his next cake.”

Tracy’s made it out a year and nearly two months since she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a deadly blood cancer.  Only half of people with myeloma make it out five years before they die.  She still has no match for a transplant of bone marrow cells from a healthy donor, the only treatment that can cure this disease.

I’m writing this message for the young adults out there who are falling in love.  Maybe you’re thinking about children.  Maybe it still feels like it all will last forever.  Maybe you and that special someone are fantasizing about growing old together.  Maybe you’re making those sweet jokes, wondering how you could ever raise a teenager.

Now realize that maybe you won’t get all that together.  Maybe the special he or she in your life will be taken away by myeloma, or leukemia.  It happens.  Or maybe it will be your friends, that fun couple you double date with, who will have that loss.

Feel the pain for a moment.  Then brush it away and do something useful.

There are two very practical things you can do about all this, right now, that are simple, quick, painless and absolutely free (and I remember how important “free” is at your age).

1. Go to Be The Match, a website of the National Marrow Donor Program, and request a free kit in the mail.  You’ll send back cheek swabs that will be profiled for a small handful of genes indicating the sort of sick person with whom you might match in the future, for whom you could at some point in the next 25 years provide life-saving marrow cells.
2. Get 5 friends to follow these two steps.

It’s like a wonderful insurance policy, but only if everyone does it.  The person you love has a match out there somewhere, and if you tell 5 people, and those 5 people tell 5 other people, and those 25 people tell 5 people, and those 125 people tell 5 people, then you have just added 625 new matches to the registry.  That will save someone’s life, someone’s love, someone’s future.

Save the future.  Be The Match.

Biographical Video from Tracy Jalbuena and her Family — Cure Her Cancer, Be the Match!

Watch this short biographical video to learn a little more about emergency room doctor and multiple myeloma patient Tracy Jalbuena:

Thank you so much to Numeriano Jalbuena, Kathy Jalbuena and Amy Jalbuena — Tracy’s father, mother and sister — for telling their family stories as part of this video. Tracy is a strong part of so many people’s lives. She’s been there for others — now it’s time for us to come together for her.

If you are between the ages of 18 and 44, the prime age for healthy donors, please consider visiting this page to sign up for the National Bone Marrow Donor Registry. It’s easy, it’s simple, it’s free — and you could save Tracy’s life.

If you aren’t in the age range for bone marrow stem cell donors, would you consider spreading the word? Send an e-mail to friends. Post a link on Facebook. Let the young people in your life know that they can make a difference — and that even if they aren’t a match for Tracy, they may be a match for someone else in need. Thanks.