Adaya González |
Madrid, (EFE).- Boys give better results in bone marrow transplants, but they only represent a third of donors: Spain needs healthy men between 18 and 40 years old like Marcos, who 4 years ago decided to “dedicate a “a little bit of time to give a little more time to a person.”
Of the person whose life Marcos saved two years ago, he only knows that “it was someone very small and from outside of Spain,” and that fills him even “more with pride and satisfaction.” “I would do it a thousand times and I continue to encourage people to do it,” he told journalists at an event held at the Ministry of Health for World Bone Marrow Donor Day, which is celebrated this Saturday.
Marcos is 26 years old and is one of the 480,000 people registered in the Spanish Registry of Bone Marrow Donors (Redmo) managed by the Josep Carreras Foundation by designation of the Ministry of Health; Last year, 21,903 new donors were added, of which just over half, 52%, are under 40 years of age and only 36% are men.
Redmo met him through a coworker, but he, who is “very apprehensive,” had his first reaction to blurt out: “Wow, you are going to donate bone marrow, what a pain, right? I imagined a needle going into my spine, take it off, take it off.”
But in the end his partner clarified that image he had: “don’t worry, you just go, they draw your blood, they register you and, if you’re lucky, they’ll call you.”
That call came two years later – “we have found someone who may be compatible with you, you have to come again” – so there he stood, with 23 other candidates, with “the luck” that it was finally his turn. . The chance of finding a compatible unrelated bone marrow donor is 1 in 3,500.
The most optimal way was to make the donation through surgery, “which may also seem like it may hurt, but no, because they put you to sleep, they are going to prick you a little in the hip that you will not even notice and that same day you wake up.” , you have a little pain for a day and then at the end you live a normal life”
He is aware that he gets the “beautiful part,” but “the hard part” goes to the patients, of course, and the teams that work to put all that machinery into action. “We only dedicate a little time to give a little more time to a person so that he has more opportunity to live.”
Gestures like Marco’s save lives like María’s, who in 2011 was diagnosed with acute myeloblastic leukemia when she was pregnant with Eva. “In my case they saved, not one, but two lives.”
He only knows about his heroine that she was a 44-year-old American woman, of whom he thought a lot at the beginning, now somewhat less, but towards whom he will never have “neither words nor way to express” his gratitude.
Although “he would love at some point to be able to tell the dimension” of what he has experienced not so much to the donors, who he assumes they already imagine, but to those who can still register in the registry.
Because, he emphasizes, “it can really hit you at any time. They are diseases that cannot be cured. In December I was healthy and on March 9 I died, there was no more, July was just around the corner.” Today she has a 12-year-old daughter who knows her story “from minute zero. It is a tremendous feeling of gratitude,” she concludes.
The entry Looking for a healthy male, 18, 40 years old. Reason: Spanish Registry of Bone Marrow Donors was first published in EFE Noticias.
