Stem Cells Save A Young Boy & I Pay My Cord Blood Bank Bill
You know those mind tricks you play with yourself? If you buy travel insurance, you won't need it. If you buy those super-enormous band-aids, they will sit unopened? That is how we felt about storing our newborn's stem cells.
My middle son's cord blood was collected minutes after his birth and is now sitting in a cryogenic freezer somewhere hopefully to never be used. Cord blood is a byproduct of birth and is full of stem cells which can help repair cells damaged by disease. We pay $100 bucks for it to sit there on ice, as some kind of insurance against bad things happening. We sort of feel like it is a bit of a scam, but we keep paying for it anyways.
When I was pregnant 9 years ago, we did our research, we asked around, and every single doctor we asked, including our pediatrician, our OB, and a cancer researcher, said it was a waste of money. In fact, all of them had recently had children and did not store the cord blood.
But we did anyways. Suckers? Or brilliant? This story in the Toronto Star made me feel a bit better. A young boy's life was saved by his own cord blood. Amazing. It was the first time that Sick Kids in Toronto had used a child's own cord blood. What?? The first time, and yet the bank has thousands of stem cells banked. Which kind of makes me feel either that it is a bit of waste of money, or the diseases we fear are so rare or is it that medical research hasn't caught up yet. But I will still keep paying it.
I am happy to know that there is a public storage bank being set up. Unlike the mother in the Star article, I would donate to the public bank, knowing that my child's stem cells could help others as well as my own family would be worthwhile. And minimize my own guilt at being so neurotic to spend money on such a thing.
Am I in the minority or majority? Did you store your newborn's stem cells? Would you store them in a public bank if you had the chance?
Want more chaos? Last year, I wrote about annoying kids music. Guess who my husband banned from the house?
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