She says she’d do it again in a heartbeat
It was a social media post – where a nurse needed a stem cell donation but didn’t receive one and consequently passed away – that motivated nurse practitioner Kaitlynn Fair to donate her stem cells. For some blood disorders, immune deficiencies, blood and bone marrow cancers, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy aren’t enough to bring about a cure. In these cases, a stem cell transplant can give someone a chance at life they didn’t have.
Kaitlynn took the first step and registered as a donor through the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP), one of many such organizations. When someone needs a transplant, they can find a donor among their friends or family, or they’ll search on databases such as NMDP’s. To join the NMDP registry, you have to be between ages 18-35.
“Stem cell transplants aren’t common – less than 25,000 are conducted each year in the United States,” says hematologist oncologist Mohammad Kazemi, MD, with Lehigh Valley Topper Cancer Institute and Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, both part of Jefferson Health. “But if someone needs a transplant, it’s a lifesaving procedure.”
For the transplant to work, the donor and the patient need to have matching immune system factors. With thousands of combinations, finding a perfect match is difficult.
Kaitlynn’s recipient was lucky. A man with acute myeloid leukemia, whose chances of finding a match were less than 29%, came up as compatible with Kaitlynn five years to the day after she registered. “When I checked my status and saw the match, I was so excited I started to cry,” Kaitlynn says. “Giving to someone you don’t know; it’s a way to give back to the world.”
Once people match, the transplant team medically evaluates the donor. If everything checks out, the process begins.
Stem cells in the bone marrow are responsible for producing all blood and immune system cells. Every day our bone marrow produces roughly 500 billion new cells to replace old blood cells. When blood cells go awry due to a chronic disease or blood disorder, a stem cell transplant may be needed.
“The goal is to replace the patient’s bone marrow and immune system,” Dr. Kazemi says. “Before the transplant, the patient receives chemotherapy plus or minus radiation. This eliminates their own diseased immune system, so we can reconstitute the bone marrow.”
There are two ways to donate stem cells for bone marrow transplant. In a vast majority of cases, stem cells are collected through the blood. Peripheral blood stem cell (PBSC) donation is a non-surgical procedure similar to donating plasma or blood. This represents about 90% of the transplants conducted, especially in the last 20 years. This is the process clinicians used to collect Kaitlynn’s stem cells.
The other type of stem cell collection is a surgical procedure under anesthesia, where stem cells are collected by taking samples directly from the bone marrow in the hip bone. Kaitlynn is on the waiting list to provide a bone marrow transplant should her recipient need it.
To start the process, the donor gets daily injections for five days, which push the stem cells out of the bone marrow into the blood. When there are enough stem cells circulating through the bloodstream, the donor’s blood is drawn from a vein in one arm (or through a central line in the chest) and passed through a specialized machine. The machine extracts the stem cells and returns the remaining red blood cells and plasma back into the body through the other arm.
The procedure usually takes four to six hours. Kaitlynn’s stem cell collection took eight hours but went smoothly, leaving her with only a few known side effects such as fatigue, mild pain, and a bit of nausea. She says the mild discomfort was minimal compared to the impact her donation made.
“It only took a week of my time to save someone’s life,” she says. “It was one of the best things I’ve ever done.”
