How to Donate Bone Marrow for Cash
Donating bone marrow can be a very painful process. You can donate bone marrow for money, but it is usually donated for free between family members when a relative is very sick with leukemia or a type of cancer. The bone marrow stimulates red and white blood cell growth. Patients can only accept their type of bone marrow, so clinics encourage people to donate bone marrow. Most healthy people between the age of 18 and 60 can donate bone marrow. It involves a needle and some pain for about 15 to 30 minutes; it also takes 7 to 14 days to fully rebuild your bone marrow you donated. Depending on your health, you can donate and make $125 for 25 cubic centimeters, $200 for 50 cubic centimeters, and $450 for 100 cubic centimeters of bone marrow.
Other People Are Reading
Instructions
-
-
1
Look up your local hospital online or in a phone book.
-
2
Call and request to be connected to the Cancer Center, or have the receptionist give you the number to the Cancer Center.
-
-
3
Tell the Cancer Center that you would like to donate bone marrow.
-
4
Schedule an appointment. At the appointment, you will be asked questions about your health history. Be honest when answering because they will extract the bone marrow and test it. If they discover, for example, that you have HIV when you said you didn't, you will not be paid. You cannot donate bone marrow if you have AIDS, HIV, auto-immune disorders, hemophilia, heart disease, liver disease, active pulmonary tuberculosis, and if you are very underweight or overweight.
-
5
Donate the required bag of blood they will give you after the bone marrow extraction. You will usually donate this a few days before the bone marrow donation.
-
6
Discuss with your doctor the type of extraction you prefer: the actual bone marrow needle extraction is more painful, but quicker while the blood-forming cell extraction takes more of your time, but is less painful. Some hospitals may only use one method, but it is worth asking. The first method of bone marrow collection is by inserting a needle into the back of the hip bone and then they slowly extract the marrow into a syringe. This method is a procedure done under local anesthesia in a hospital; this is a shot that will numb the skin of where the larger bone marrow syringe will be inserted.
The second method to retrieve the marrow is done by collecting cells through a procedure called peripheral blood stem cell donation or PBSC. PBSC donors will get daily shot of a drug called filgrastim for five days. Filgrastim increases the number of blood-forming cells in the blood. After five days of receiving the shot you will go to the clinic and have blood removed through a needle in one arm and passed through a machine that separates out the blood-forming cells and then the blood is tubed over to your other arm and re-injected into your system.
-
7
Prepare for your appointment. Don't eat or drink anything after midnight and the morning before the bone marrow donation.
-
8
Go to your appointment and have your bone marrow or blood-forming cells extracted. After they extract the suggested max amount of bone marrow or blood-forming cells, you are free to leave. You may feel weak for 7 to 14 days, but you usually feel 100 percent after 2 to 3 days. After a week, all the tests should be complete on your bone marrow and the check will be sent to you.
-
1
