By Melody Wang
Daily Bruin Reporter
He may not wear the cape or drive the car ““ but he is a
hero.
Ron Balbuena, a UCLA graduate student at the School of Public
Health is like any other student on campus”“ except he has
saved the life of an 8-year-old boy by donating his bone
marrow.
“This really may be the greatest thing I ever do for
anybody,” Balbuena said. “What if the boy ends up doing
something great or even if he doesn’t, there’s a life
out there because of me.”
On Wednesday and Thursday, other students will have the chance
to do what Balbuena did by registering to donate marrow with the
Asians for Miracle Marrow Matches.
A3M is co-sponsoring the event with other Asian student
organizations, such as Asian Pacific Coalition and Pilipinos for
Community Health.
Though the bone marrow donor drive is targeted toward recruiting
Asians, Monica Lee, a programmer from APC, said everyone is welcome
to register.
About 30 percent of patients have a relative who is able to
donate marrow, but the other 70 percent needs an unrelated donor,
according to the National Marrow Donor Program. Patients are most
likely to find donors within their own ethnic group.
“There’s a great need for Asians to give bone marrow
just because there’s so few Asians registered,” Lee
said.
But with various bone marrow programs, the number of transplants
performed on Asian and Pacific Islander patients have tripled since
1995, according to the NMDP.
Program coordinator Francis Baltasar said many people do not
register to donate bone marrow because they are unaware of its
importance.
“A lot of people in general, not just Asians, have this
fear of being a marrow donor. But it really is a beautiful thing to
donate bone marrow because there’s potential to save
someone’s life,” said Baltasar, who is also a director
of PCH.
Most people are scared, she said, because they aren’t
aware of the bone marrow donating process and think it is much more
painful than it actually is.
As a result, A3M held a workshop Monday to educate students
about the process of registering and qualifying to be a marrow
donor.
“One of the things to emphasize is that it doesn’t
take that long to become part of the registry, just a few
minutes,” Balbuena said.
Registering as a marrow donor consists of filling out consent
forms and giving a small sample of blood.
Contrary to what some people may think, Balbuena said students
can register on an empty stomach or with a cold. Also, there is no
minimum weight requirement, only a maximum.
“If you’re about 5 foot 3 inches, the maximum weight
you can be is 220 pounds,” Balbuena said.
After registering, it takes time to be entered into the national
database. A donor will be contacted if their marrow matches a
patient’s and will then undergo further tests to make sure
they are healthy.
Balbuena said he spent half a day at the hospital when he
donated marrow. Though he awoke from the surgery feeling sore, he
said he felt good enough to attend classes later that
afternoon.
Doctors extracted about 5 percent of Balbuena’s marrow
from his hip.
“A lot of people think it’s from the spinal
cord,” he said. “That’s probably why they choose
not to do it.”
According to the Jade Magazine Web site, only about 6 percent of
the 3.6 million registered donors are Asian or Pacific Islanders.
Chances of finding a matching donor average about one in 20,000,
but for Asians, the odds are one in a million.
The bone marrow drive has been going on for years and is done
not only in November, which is National Marrow Awareness Month, but
throughout the year. Programmers plan to have another drive in
winter or spring quarter, Lee said.
“For one drive that they had, about 80 people registered
in one day,” Lee said. “We’d like to get that
number up even higher.”
National Marrow Donor Program Faciliated
Transplants As of Aug. 31, the NMDP had facilitated 11,127
unrelated marrow transplants, of which 322 were for Asian or
Pacific Islander patients. The minority patient total was 1,637.
SOURCE: National Marrow Donor Program Original graphic by JACOB
LIAO/Daily Bruin Web adaptation by STEPHEN WONG