Gametes In Love

Following my cord blood donation rant, I continued making calls and asking around for organizations that accept cord blood. And I found some!!!!

There are 2 organizations that will accept cord blood out of state: LifebankUSA (which focuses on clinical research), and Cryo Bank International (which places collected cord blood on a national transplant registry).

Sadly, LifebankUSA cannot accept a donation from me. Turns out that my Eastern European residency in the 1980s may have exposed me to mad-cow disease contaminated meats. While my brain doesn’t feel particularly swiss-cheesey (pregnancy and mommy brain excluded), this was a sad blow to be honest. It’s one thing to be rejected for something that I was personally in control of (say getting a tattoo recently, or sharing needles), but when it’s something that was not my choice, it hurt. Our conversation lasted all but 10 minutes once we began discussing my origins. On the bonus side I didn’t have to fill out 14 pages worth of forms 🙂

However, Cryo Bank International doesn’t have this problem. I asked them to confirm, and the donation coordinator said I looked good, and pending three wet signatures from my doc (I had forms faxed over from them) my paperwork should be final and they’ll send me a donation kit.

Kinda cool!

I AM a little disappointed that my OB’s office charges for the collection of cord blood when used for donation purposes. $200 ain’t cheap, yo! The moms that directed me to these 2 organizations said that their OBs did not charge, so I was kind of expecting Dr. M wouldn’t either. Given how awesome she and her office is on everything else, this was just a surprise. However, our very own (version of) Suzie Orman confirmed that any money I spend on the collection of cord blood can be considered a donation for tax purposes, even though it’s not being paid directly to the donation organization.

So… as of right now, all systems are a go. This does add a bit more complexity to the “todo” list when I go into labor, and then the hours post-recovery, but it’s important to me and I’m glad we get a chance to do it.

I would still prefer to donate to clinical research, and if I get a call from Genentec I’d be thrilled, but I’m glad that there’s a plan.

Woot!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 19th, 2010 at 10:21 am and is filed under Baking Baby, Random Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.