Donating Cord blood, harder than I'd anticipated

Being pregnant brings a tremendous amount of advertising and offers your way. One of the big pushes is for you to arrange to have your umbilical cord blood collected and stored. It is essentially cryogenics for babies - in that they store these cells in case your child ever becomes sick and can then donate this useful bio-material to your own baby (you can learn more about the benefits here: http://www.lifeforcecryobanks.com/). It is actually a great and fascinating scientific resource, but it is also hugely expensive and way outside of our little budget to store it for ourselves, especially with how rare it is that it would ever really need to be used or would actually work out to be a proper match (these donations are most frequently used on siblings). But because cord blood has so many (at least 75) existing medical transplant uses that could conceivably be a match for another child with cancer or something like that, and so many (over 700) in development, and because I REALLY really hate things going to waste, it seems a shame for no one to benefit from my baby's cord blood, just because we can't afford to store it. So a few months ago, I set about to figure out how I could donate the cord blood instead. I figured my doctor could tell me how to go about it all . . . she was not helpful, so I was on my own. It was way more of a headache than I ever expected (hence my justification for blogging about it as stepping out into discomfort), but long story short, I think I finally got it figured out. I hope the hassle was worth it, but if nothing else, I figured I could share what I learned so others who might be interested won't have as much running around to do. Jump to the end for a quick solution, but I've included extra resources and my experiences with certain agencies leading up to that, in case that could be helpful.

So here are two guides for parents about cord blood banking (and donating):
1) http://parentsguidecordblood.org/content/usa/banklists/publicbanks_new.shtml#limitdonate
2) http://www.marrow.org/HELP/Donate_Cord_Blood_Share_Life/index.html

but even this is a alot to wade through, because you might be delivering at a hospital that will collect it right there, but you might be no where near a local collection service and have to find a national program, like I did. So if the above links don't help you find a bank near you, you can go straight to a list of national programs here: http://marrow.org/HELP/Donate_Cord_Blood_Share_Life/How_to_Donate_Cord_Blood/CB_Participating_Hospitals/Donating_at_Other_Hospitals/donating_at_other_hospitals.pl

I first looked into the MD Anderson program because I'm from Houston (where MD Anderson is) and am familiar with how great the hospital is and that loads of people I grew up with as well as people from all around the world have found healing there (did you know that Houston has one of the world's largest medical centers?). The people I talked to there, when I could get them on the phone (they're a bit short staffed) were really great and lovely to interact with. But their donation program is part of a research study, so their regulations are a bit tight. They require that the person collecting the cord blood (the doctor delivering your baby) go through their training on how to do the collection for the sake of consistency. Its only a 7 minute online video, I didn't think this would be a problem. But, my doctor is part of a practice and therefore can't guarantee that she will be the actual individual delivering my baby, and wouldn't ask the other doctors to do the training just in case, so it was a no-go for me and MD Anderson.

So, I moved onto Lifeforce Cryobanks. It was a pile of paperwork to fill out, get signatures from doctors on, and mail to them (which needs to be done before you are 34 weeks along), but it seems like things are going to work out with this one. I just had the final phone conversation this week confirming that I am approved to donate. . . .  if you're looking for a quick way to arrange to donate, you might go straight here: http://www.lifeforcecryobanks.com/enroll/donating/. If I deliver on a weekend, this will all be for nothing as they can't receive it then - so I hope someone else can find this useful, or pass it along to a pregnant friend and somebody out there will receive a needed transplant to make all this worth it!