Day 44: the Capitol, and a law about giving something away

The Legislative Building stands at 416 Sid Snyder Avenue SW. Walter R. Wilder and Harry K. White, New York architects, had their design chosen in April 1911. The building was finished in 1928, its outside made from Wilkeson sandstone quarried in Pierce County. It stands 287 feet tall, and the state describes it as the tallest building in North America with a masonry dome — masons put that dome together from over 1,400 stones, finishing on 13 October 1926. The Olmsted Brothers designed the campus landscape, and in 1979 a 55-acre portion of the west campus became a National Historic District. The building is not sealed away: free fifty-minute tours run most days, and the public areas can be walked without one.

There is a more specific reason to end here. Washington law, RCW 41.06.570, requires all executive agencies of state government to allow their employees paid leave — not to exceed thirty days in a two-year period, charged separately from sick or annual leave — to take part in what the statute calls life-giving procedures: a medically supervised procedure involving the testing, sampling or donation of organs, tissues and other human body components, without compensation, for someone's medically necessary treatment. Blood and plasma are excluded by name. Marrow is not named at all; it falls inside the general language. The stated intent is narrow and plain — the law is meant "only to encourage altruistic life-giving procedures."

What a donation costs a donor is mostly time, and less of it than people expect. NMDP says it pays all donation and travel costs, covers all costs associated with the donor's health checks, and also covers missed pay from work. About nine in ten donations are peripheral blood stem cells: nonsurgical, done at an outpatient clinic, preceded by five days of a medication called filgrastim, with blood drawn through a machine that separates out the blood stem cells and returns the rest. The remaining one in ten is marrow, collected under anesthesia with hollow needles from the back of the pelvic bone. A state that writes those days into its own employment rules has put the same idea into law for its own workforce, in this building.

Arriving here is not a claim. The walk has not changed a law and it has not put anyone on a registry — the Jada Bascom Foundation does not run one. It began in Seattle, at the research center where E. Donnall Thomas's work established bone marrow and blood stem cell transplantation as a lifesaving treatment for leukemia and other blood diseases, work that shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. It ends where the state writes down what it will and will not make easy. Between those two places sits the part no institution can do for anyone: a person deciding to be typed.