Baby Knapp: Organ Donor!

This entry is primarily for all my expecting mom friends – a tip in the endless sea of prenatal information! I don’t know about everyone else out there, but about a minute after we found out we were pregnant, we found ourselves on every baby mailing list in the country – Target, Huggies, Parenting Magazine… I don’t know how they do it, but they found us.

One of the things we were barraged with were solicitations for umbilical cord blood storage. Basically, after the baby is born, the doctor (or whomever has a free hand) extracts the blood from the umbilical cord, and sends it to be stored at a blood bank. It would then be made available in the unfortunate case that the child (or his/her family) might need these incredibly powerful stem cells, proven to be a highly effective treatment of a variety of cancers, genetic diseases, blood disorders and immune system disorders – even more so than their more controversial cousins, the embryonic stem cells, which seem to cause or cure nothing other than political turmoil. Dare I digress… Anyhow, there are a number of company’s that will collect and store your baby’s umbilical cord blood/stem cells for the duration of their life somewhere to the tune of $15,000 - $25,000. There’s no guarantee that your child or anyone in your family will ever need the blood, but it will be stored for you exclusively, just in case. Nice intention, but sorry, we’d like to send our kid to college someday!

However! One benefit of our childbirth class was learning about a DONATION program through Cryobanks International – the largest umbilical cord blood donation program in the country (check them out at http://www.cryo-intl.com). With them, you donate the umbilical cord blood and it WILL be used to benefit someone who needs it. But, what if Baby Knapp or one of us DOES need these cells in the future? We wouldn’t get Baby Knapp’s blood back, but because we donated at birth, we would be put at the top of the list to receive an appropriate match right away. So, it’s a win-win for everyone! All you have to do is fill out a questionnaire before your 35th week of pregnancy to make sure you haven’t had mad cow disease or recently shot up crack, and once your doctor and the company approve your application, you get a handy little kit to take with you to hospital when you go into labor. They extract the blood in the L&D room and send it in to Cryobanks for you.

We talked about it at length with our doctor, and she was all for it, saying this could be one of the most significant contributions to the use of blood cell therapy for healing serious diseases, and was thrilled to be a part of the process. She said she’s read article upon article about how much more effective these cells are than embryonic stem cells because they can develop into any type of healing cell you need them to be. The science behind it is quite interesting, indeed.

So, to make this long story even longer… We were approved for this process, and our handy little kit is already to go with us to the hospital! Since lately we feel like charitable giving of ourselves is like getting blood from a turnip, we were thrilled to be able to participate in this program and contribute to the healing of someone out there who really needs it. And, what a lesson we can share with Baby Knapp when he/she is old enough to understand it all! While we hope this doesn’t foretell the old cliché - Baby Knapp selling his/her plasma to cover the bills someday – it is quite humbling to know we can give to a greater good from the very first hour of his or her life! Check it out, and perhaps you can do the same!