14. Cord blood donation

Not sure if I have already mentioned it, but I have been very interested in donating my umbilical cord and/or blood. I looked into it when I was pregnant with my miscarriage last year and have been doing some research over the past few weeks. I asked our clinician and midwife a few weeks ago who said it isn't something they do as a hospital, but they often have people coming in to collect the donations. It would be up to me to find the person who would come on the day of the birth and take away whatever is needed. Simple! Or is it?

I started googling but kept hitting dead ends through the NHS. There are 3 places in London and a small handful of others dotted around the country that collect donations. None near here unfortunately. I wasn't willing to give up so I kept plugging away. 

I kept googling and found a number of companies offering a christmas discount. I saw that they charge hundreds of pounds to come and collect for you. When I say hundreds, it's £600-£900 for the ones I very briefly looked at. Not exactly pocket change! When looking a little further to find out why on earth me giving away life saving blood should cost so much, I realised these companies collect and store in private for you! I didn't bother reading the blurb on why anybody would even consider this as an option. I don't want to keep it, I wanted it to hopefully help someone else rather than it go in the bin.

Eventually I emailed Anthony Nolan, I have just had a call which I found very interesting. I am already on the donor list for Anthony Nolan as a bone marrow donor so I know a little bit about their work. It's a very beneficial thing to be on to help people with illnesses like leukemia and various blood cancers. You just send a mouth swab and they put you on their list. So go and sign up today! 

This phone call was very informative and the lady explained lots of things to me.

Firstly they won't collect from babies born before 37 weeks as the babies need all the blood from the cord as they are classed as premature, so that counts us out unfortunately. 

I asked about two friends who are expecting and seem interested in how it works. They are both planning to have their babies at different hospitals locally, neither of which are where Anthony Nolan collect from. She explained that they have a bank full of blood from white british people, so they only really need to collect from people with different ethnicities at the moment. Hence focusing on certain hospitals. 

She told me that if I, or my babies were to ever need any blood collected from an umbilical cord, it's very rare that I would, but supplies are high enough to know that we have access to it. 

They are conducting studies at the moment into future treatments using the stem cells and things collected from umbilical cords and blood, but until these studies get to further stages, they don't need more. At which point, they will open more centres countrywide to get more donors.

This makes sense. 

I didn't even need to ask about the sites that I had seen where you can privately store blood. She basically didn't have much positive stuff to say about them and the quality of collection and storage is not guaranteed like it would be on the NHS or with a charity like Anthony Nolan. It sounds to me like these sites are companies marketing and selling these banks to vulnerable people unnecessarily. It makes sense to me if you have a rare disorder, blood type or other health factor which may mean you need something very specific. These people are the minority, but I guess they are good at creating panic in people.