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Lisa Kowalski, RN, BSN, says she was swamped with work at her telemetry unit the day of the bone marrow registry drive at her hospital, Banner Thunderbird Medical Center in Glendale, Ariz.

Then her mother, Christine Kowalski, also an employee at the hospital, tapped her on the shoulder and told her to follow her down to the marrow drive, which was being held by the hospital in partnership with the National Marrow Donor Program.
“It just took five minutes” for the preliminary test, a check swab, to be placed in the registry, Kowalski says.

But that quick test led to a life-saving procedure for another woman in the country.
Five months later, Kowalski says she received a call from the NMDP that she and 200 registered donors could be a possible match for a 60-year old woman with a form of myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) that indicated pre-cancer cells for acute myelogenous leukemia.

But the NMDP needed further testing to see who would be the best match. Kowalski says she donated 15 viles of blood to the program for further screening.

A month later she received another call, this time to tell her she was the only perfect match.

Without hesitation, she told them she would do it.

Donating bone marrow is done through two different procedures, according to Catherine Claeys, spokeswoman for the National Marrow Donor Program.

In the donation of peripheral blood stem cells or PBSC, the donor receives filgrastim for five days to increase blood-forming cells. The blood is then taken from one arm, passed through a machine that separates the blood forming cells, and returns the blood to the patient in the other arm.

The donation of bone marrow itself requires surgery, where doctors use special, hollow needles to withdraw liquid marrow from the back of your pelvic bones.

Claeys says more than 70 percent of adult donations are now taken with the PBSC procedure, with the remaining undergoing the surgery.

Kowalski says she entered a trial that could have taken her on either path, but she was hoping for the surgery because filgrastim often comes with flu-like symptoms and she wanted to work right up to the day of the procedure.

She got her preference and, last November, underwent a 90 minute surgery under general anesthesia at the City of Hope at Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center’s Transplantation Program. Her 1.5 liters of marrow was then flown to an undisclosed located to the recipient.

Kowalski says she woke up stiff and sore and took six days off from work to recover.
“I was still limping a lot and I couldn’t stand up or sit very long when I went back to work,” she says. “But my co-workers were very helpful and supportive.”

Claeys says 10,000 Americans each year get a pre-leukemia disease or other blood disease that can be cured by a bone marrow transplant from an unrelated donor. The NMDP recently passed its 30,000 patient mark for bone marrow or cord plant donations from the registry, which now has 7 million donors registered nationwide and coordinates with other country registries to access nearly 11 million donors worldwide.

Many on the registry are medical professionals, Claeys says.

“Those in the medical community have an understanding of the procedures involved that helps raise awareness and clear up misconceptions,” she says.

Given the chance, Kowalski says she would certainly do it again and hopes to some day meet the woman that received her donation.

“At the one-year mark you can contact the people that scheduled your procedure and they will contact [the other patient],” she says. “I definitely want to meet her.”

For more information on bone marrow donation, go to www.marrow.org or call (800) 627-7692.

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Teresa McUsic is a freelance writer. To comment on this article e-mail editorSW@nurseweek.com.