MASON CITY, IA - Imagine undergoing a medical procedure to help someone you don't even know.
That's exactly what people sign up for when they decide to become bone marrow donors, and a north Iowa lawmaker on the donor list recently found out he's a match.
When State Representative Josh Byrnes isn't in Des Moines working on legislation he's the Industrial Technology Division Chair at NIACC. Soon he'll be able to add one more title to the list: bone marrow donor.
“They said we need you to come to Iowa City we think we have a perfect match to your bone marrow,” said Byrnes.
Byrnes got on the bone marrow donor list a couple years ago at an event for Connor Gordon, a St. Ansgar student who suffered from leukemia and received his own marrow transplant.
“Kudos to this kid and his family for raising awareness because without him we wouldn't be sitting here today,” said Byrnes.
While bone marrow donation might bring visions of long invasive operations to mind, Byrnes says over the years things have changed.
“It's not so much bone marrow that's being transplanted it's the stem cells and they're finding out the stem cells are just as good in most cases as to what the bone marrow is,” said Byrnes.
Here's how the process works: Byrnes has already undergone a day long physical to check for health problems. Starting next week he'll take shots to increase his stem cell count, and finally start a five hour long extraction process. All while the recipient is destroying his or her own immune system to accept the new cells.
“If something happens to me and I don't follow through on this it cost that person their life because they have no immune system,” said Byrnes.
That person is a 64 year old from France.
“They told me out of the entire global registry I’m one out of 12 million people that matches this individual in France which just blows my mind that you're one in 12 million people,” said Byrnes.
And while this procedure could very well save a life, Byrnes will be the first to say he's not doing it for the attention. He just wants to spread the word and get more people on the marrow donor list.
“You just never know you never know who you're going to match up with and there's a lot of need for it,” said Byrnes.
Byrnes describes the actual extraction process as similar to dialysis. About 24 liters of his blood will be cycled to get as many stem cells as possible.
He says if you're interested in becoming a donor it's a simple process and the entire procedure has been very non-invasive.
