Thursday, August 26, 2010

Donating the Umbilical Cord

This morning when Cristian was donating blood at Burlo children's hospital, where Sugar will eventually be born, he spent a(nother) half hour talking to the person who is in charge of umbilical cord donation for Trieste. Italy has only had this program for a short amount of time. The deal is, you can opt to donate the cord, which gets put in an international database so that in the event there is a match with someone who needs those yummy cells, they can have at them. If we should happen to need those yummy cells, we would also be eligible for them, but only if the cord hasn't been used for anyone else. If we want to keep them just for ourselves, we could do that too, but that would be called Umbilical Cord storage, many Italians do this in Switzerland, where they have been doing this type of thing for a long time. You tell them when you're due, when you're going into labor, they come and get the cord, and you pay them to keep it cold until baby turns 18.

We are very excited about donating and are happy you can finally do it here in Italy!

2 comments: