It´s a beautiful day to save lives

This post isn´t about telling you about my treatment steps. I want to use my huuuge and widespread audience (haha) to make an important plea.

The next step for me is the autologous stem cell transplantation. That means I can be my own stem cell donor since my blood building system has not been affected by the cancer (lucky me!). For this purpose I will be harvesting my stem cells in the next weeks (that´s what DHAP is for) and they will be transplanted back after BEAM. If everything goes as planned I´m cancer free after that. And hopefully stay that way for five more years.

However, in case of a recurrence (which has kinda high chances with my kind of cancer) I would need a so-called allogeneic stem cell transplantation which means stem cells from a donor that is not me. And that is where you come into play! :) Unfortunately it is not easy finding a matching donor since the match has to be 100%. Good chances lie within the family because of the genetics but still only one third of all patients find a donor within their families. So the more people are registered in the databases for stem cell donors worldwide the higher the chance to find your "genetic twin" that has the matching stem cells to save your life.

Just say "Ahhh" li´l Biebs!

Registering is really easy, in Germany you can order your registering kit online (here: https://www.dkms.de/de/spender-werden), they send you cotton swabs which you put in your mouth (yeah, just like in CSI ;)) and simply send back. It doesn´t cost you anything but maybe ten minutes of your time. And just think that you could save someone´s life with that. I honestly don´t know how it works in other countries, so if you have tips for that you could maybe leave them in the comments. The database is worldwide connected and will be searched by the hospital, so it doesn´t matter where you´re from.

Pheeww, she´s back.

If I need an allogeneic stem cell transplantation I don´t have too much time to waste to be waiting for a matching donor, so my doctor suggested that my family should register now already. And I thought why just my family, I can also ask my friends. And THEN I thought why stop there in times of social networks and all that s....tuff. That´s why I´m writing about it here. And I also have reactivated my FB account for that (did you hear the huge sigh of relief from Mark Zuckerberg? Here´s the link https://www.facebook.com/sparkilicious). So share it, tell your friends and your family and your colleagues and all your followers on Twitter or whatever.

Cause saving a life (my life?) simply by sucking on a cotton swab? That´s a no-brainer.

P.S.: Okay, for the actual live saving you would need to do more than sucking a swab. If there´s a patient matching your profile you would of course need to actually donate stem cells. But don´t worry, I will tell you all about that in approximately two weeks when I´m done with donating my stem cells. :)