Nice T-S Bone Marrow Transplant Story

A nicely done story on the front page of today's Times- Standard regarding "bone marrow" transplants. This time they seemed to cover all the bases. Bone marrow is rarely used in transplants nowadays. That's why I placed it in quotation marks.

A year or two or three ago, the Times- Standard had a similar story about some gal from Hoopa(?) that was looking for a bone marrow donor. That story gave the impression that bone marrow was actually used for the transplant. Understandable, since even organizations involved in the process still use the term.

While not made too clear in today's story, the transplants are nearly always made today using stem cells taken from a donor's blood. They rarely extract bone marrow as they did years ago.

What they do is kill the patient's bone marrow using radiation or strong chemicals. The donor's stem cells are infused into the patient pretty much like a blood transfusion. The stem cells then create new bone marrow, hopefully minus the disease.

When that last story was published, I went to what were then the Times- Standard's Topix comments and simply pointed out that they use stem cells from the blood, not bone marrow. What followed were a bunch of quite nasty remarks in which I was accused of interfering with the girl's quest for a donor.

No matter how I tried to explain it, the folks who commented (with the exception of one who knew what I was trying to explain) really went after me. One told me that maybe my wife was special and got some special kind of treatment but (in so many words) I shouldn't interfere in other's efforts to get a bone marrow transplant.

I still can't figure out where they were coming from. Maybe it was the way I wrote my comments? At any rate, this latest story proves that my comments back then were correct and I feel vindicated.