The tenth awareness day, and the one thing the walk cannot do for you

Ten of the forty-five days on this route are set aside as Bone Marrow Awareness Days, and this is the last one. In the founder's own words: "I stay where I am to educate about donors, transplants, how and why they should join." That is the entire plan for the day. She does not walk. The day is given over to questions — from people who have never heard of HLA typing, people who half-remember a swab drive at their college, people who are afraid of needles and want to know precisely what the procedure involves before they decide anything.

What she explains is unglamorous, which is the point. Joining a registry is a cheek swab. NMDP mails a free kit, you swab the inside of your cheeks, you send it back in a prepaid envelope, and your tissue type goes onto a searchable list. NMDP takes new members between the ages of 18 and 35 and keeps them listed as potential donors until 61 unless they ask to be removed; Canada's stem cell registry, run by Canadian Blood Services, takes people between the ages of 17 and 35. If a match ever comes, about nine in ten donations are peripheral blood stem cells, given at an outpatient clinic, and about one in ten is marrow, collected under anesthesia. NMDP says it pays all donation and travel costs, covers the health checks, and covers missed pay from work.

The Jada Bascom Foundation is not a registry. It does not perform HLA typing, mail swab kits, collect cells, or decide who is eligible — official registries do those things, under their own medical rules, and their criteria change. Walking this route did not register a single person, and reaching Olympia does not register anyone either. The walk exists to put the question somewhere a person will actually meet it. The answer belongs to each reader: read what an official registry asks of you, decide honestly, and if the answer is yes, begin it there — nmdp.org in the United States, blood.ca in Canada.

There is one reason to think the question is worth carrying this far. Jada Bascom needed marrow from a stranger as an infant, and the stranger turned out to be Torsten Huber, in Germany, who had joined a registry years earlier for no reason that had anything to do with her. The system that found him now holds more than forty million donors and cord blood units, listed by registries in more than fifty countries and searched together. None of it works unless people who will most likely never be called put their names down anyway. That is what the last day is for.