FORT LEAVENWORTH, Kansas — Every three minutes, about one person is diagnosed with a form of blood cancer for which the treatment could require a bone marrow transplant with healthy bone marrow obtained from a donor.
Hoping to encourage more people to sign up for the bone marrow registry, Staff Sgt. Chris Womack, patrol officer with the Combined Arms Center Law Enforcement Activity, set up a booth at the Post Exchange June 26, 2025, to allow community members at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to join the registry. To prepare for the registration event, Womack worked on behalf of Salute To Life, a program to help members of the Department of Defense and their dependents become bone marrow donors.
Community members who were interested in becoming part of the registry to help link potential bone marrow donors with those in need filled out forms and took samples by swabbing the inside of their cheeks.
According to Salute to Life informational materials distributed at the drive, about one in every 430 registrants will go on to be a bone marrow donor due to the specificity of the match, and 70 percent of patients will need a donor who is not related to them. Once matched, two different methods of donation are possible.
“You can donate bone marrow, which is when you go to Washington, D.C. They put you under general anesthesia and then they pull bone marrow directly from your hip. They only do that less than 10 percent of time,” Womack said. “The other 90 percent of what they do is they give you a medication called Filgrastim. It's a couple of injections in your arms. They do that for four days, it makes your body produce extra white blood cells, and then they hook you up to a machine that's the same one they use if you donate plasma. It pulls your blood out, cycles out the white blood cells, puts everything back in, and then they take those white blood cells and send them off to wherever they're needed.”
Womack, who has been a donor, said symptoms after donation are minimal and go away rather quickly. However, he thinks the symptoms are nothing in comparison to the knowledge of helping save a life.
“You’re giving part of your blood up for someone, and it actually does a lot for them. It changes their life when we're done,” Womack said in regard to why he encourages others to donate. “There's a letter that I got from my recipient. It's the only contact you'll ever really have with them. But it's really cool to see how a couple of days of your time can extend someone's life out.”
Since Salute to Life is a DoD program, there are regulations that ensure soldiers who participate are given leave if they are called to make a donation.
“If you are a service member, they give you permissive TDY. They fly you to pretty much anywhere in the country you want to go (to donate), so you can get a mini vacation out of it,” Womack said, before going on to explain his own donation experience. “I was in Korea when I donated and flew my entire family to San Antonio. I got to be in the states, go to Alamo, see somewhere I've never been, and that was all paid for. They pay for your hotels, they pay for your flights, they give you per diem for food. You don't come out of pocket for anything related to the donation process. It's a really cool program.”
New registrants shared that the booth and simple sign-up process was encouraging to their registration. Staff Sgt. Chad Addison, Army Corrections Brigade, said that he has never been able to donate blood due to having tattoos since he was 15 years old, and that he believes blood marrow donation is a good way to give back in place of that.
Dispatch Specialist Truman Scofield said that he thought there was no reason not to donate.
“There’s no reason not to. I think the hardest part about this entire process is not actually donating. It’s just taking the time to sit down and write down your information (to sign up),” Scofield said.
Womack agreed that signing up is important for people to do in order to help fight blood cancer.
“New people every day come down with this kind of cancer, and if it gets to the point where they need the registry, it's their last chance to live,” Womack said. “So, the longer we put off signing up, the less chance that they have of getting that match in time and being able to save their life. It's super important to get in there, get on (the registration) quickly, and get as many people as we can, so that we have more of a pool to pull from to find matches.”
All registrants must be between the ages of 18-60 and in general good health. People can register even if they cannot donate blood. To register, visit https://www.salutetolife.org/.
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