Leanne Flanagan, Swansea University
I would urge anyone who is of the right age and of good health to join the register. It's one of the greatest things anyone could ever do. It’s so simple to donate and could give somebody another chance at life.
I signed up to The Anthony Nolan Trust’s register at university during a free period, and I never really thought beyond that. I knew that there was that chance I would match somebody who needed a bone marrow transplant and thought that if I were required to do this then I would be immensely proud. It must have been around two years later that I received the letter; I received it on my 21st birthday.
I matched somebody well enough to warrant further testing, which meant giving some blood. It took a few weeks for the results to come back and when they did, I was a match.
I agreed to go ahead with the donation; I didn’t have any worries regarding the procedure and was happy to have the opportunity to make such a huge difference to someone. There’s this misconception that it’s an awfully inconvenient, risky procedure, but from my experience, it’s not!
The next step, around two weeks later, involved a series of injections. Well four. A nurse came to my house to administer the first three. They were painless, didn’t take up much time and I barely noticed any side affects. The fourth day I travelled to London to receive my fourth injection and stayed overnight at a nearby hotel.
The worst which can be said for the procedure was that it was boring. You have to sit/lay on the bed for around five hours. From one arm the blood is taken and through the other it goes back in. The arm from which the blood was taken I had to keep quite still the other I could move. It wasn’t painful.
I received a note from my recipient not too long ago and it was extremely touching, the whole thing was most definitely worth it!
