This past Wednesday, in honor of Blood Cancer Awareness Month, Hamilton College partnered up with Be The Match to host a Bone Marrow Registry Drive.

This event, held in Beneicke Village between the hours of 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., was intended to get volunteers to join the national Bone Marrow Registry — a list of potential donors who would be willing to donate their marrow to individuals with leukemia, provided that they ended up being a match for their blood characteristics.

This issue is particularly pertinent to the Hamilton community because it touches one of our own. Betty House, a Hamilton alumna and assistant at the Levitt Center. House personally knows the pain associated with having a family member with this disease, as her own brother was diagnosed with blood cancer.

When he was unable to find a match in either his family or the worldwide registry, she took it upon herself to hold drives to work to increase the amount of accesible donors for patients in need have access too.

Working with the Be the Match registry, she has added 1660 donors to the existing registry. Five of these individuals were matches, and two of them were from the Hamilton community.

The process of registration is relatively simple. Outside the Diner, tables were set up with representatives from Be The Match — a non-profit subsidiary of the National Marrow Donor Company (NMDP) whose mission hinges on providing patients with the marrow and umbilical cord blood transplants they need to survive; students need only walk up and fill out a pamphlet.

In addition to asking basic questions such as name, age, address, and date of birth, said pamphlet asked potential donors to rate their likeliness to actually go through with donation, so as to gauge their commitment level.

The logic behind this is making sure that people who sign up for the registry do not give patients false hope by committing to something they have no intention with following through.

Then, students can decide whether or not to officially join the Registry, which basically means determining whether or not they would like their names to be on a list that would make them eligible for being contacted in regards to making donations.

Finally, individuals consent to having a cheek swab which technicians process in order to ascertain blood type.

The importance of signing up for this registry cannot be stressed enough. Unfortunately, 75 percent of individuals with blood cancer do not have matches within their families.

As such, the registry is often their only option for obtaining the marrow they need to treat their disease; yet, the match rate for the registry is just 25 percent due to its size.

The hope is that if more people join this registry, a higher percentage of patients will have a likelihood of finding a match because the donor pool will be larger.

Since Be the Match was founded in 1987, it has facilitated more than 43,000 transplants and has amassed a donor pool of approximately 9 million donors.

Finding a donor can quite literally be the difference between life and death, which makes achieving a substantial donor pool critical; the need becomes even more urgent when one considers the fact that, every three minutes, an individual in the United States is diagnosed with leukemia, lymphoma or another kind of blood cancer.

There are a variety of myths about bone marrow donation that make people hesitant to donate; by dispelling these, we can hope to increase donation levels. Primarily, there is a fear that donation is an excruciatingly painful process — this is not the case. 90 percent of donations are completed through what is called a peripheral blood stem cell (PBSC) donation.

The procedure involves a needle being stuck into the arm of the donor; blood is then processed through a machine that separates the blood forming stem-cells from the rest of the sample.

This is not a surgical procedure and can be accomplished at an outpatient treatment facility. For the 10 percent of cases in which surgery is required, anesthesia is used, rendering the process virtually painless for the donor.

Another misconception is that joining the registry compels you to donate your marrow. However, signing the registry only makes you eligible to donate, in the event that you are a match for a patient.

Not only is the chance of being eligible 1 in 540, but you reserve the right to decline to donate at any point in the process–you have body autonomy and no one can coerce you in any way.

Finally, there is a misconception that this is an expensive process.

On the contrary, all of the costs will be covered, either by the patient’s health coverage or by the registry company itself — this includes the cost of transportation, housing, medical costs and food for both you and a friend or family member who you would like to accompany you.

Those willing to join the registry, who haven’t already, can go to Be The Match’s website to sign up. Additionally, they are hosting registry drives at Utica College, MVCC (the Alumni Center), and Herkimer College in the days to come.

To be eligible to give marrow, individuals need only be of good health; if you are unsure whether or not you qualify, Be The Match has also listed medical requirements for donation on its website.