A day standing still, in Quilcene

Ten of the walk's forty-five days are Bone Marrow Awareness Days, and this is one of them. In Jeana'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. No mileage, no schedule to keep, no stage. She stops moving so that people have somewhere to find her.

If you stop, here is what she will actually go through. What a match is: for HLA matching, doctors look at up to twelve markers on your DNA and generally want eight to ten of those twelve to match. Why family is usually not the answer: three quarters of patients have no fully matched donor among their own relatives, which is what makes strangers the whole story. What donating is really like: nine donors in ten give blood stem cells through an IV over a few hours with no surgery, one in ten donates marrow, nearly always under general anaesthesia, and NMDP covers all donation and travel costs either way. And what joining takes, which is a free swab kit, a cheek swab, and a prepaid envelope.

She will also tell you about Jada, who was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia at one month old and had her transplant at seven months, and about Torsten Huber, a stranger in Germany enrolled by DKMS — one organisation founded in 1991 that has now facilitated some 135,000 stem cell donations. That is not a story about luck. It is a story about how many people had to have already said yes for one of them to turn out to be the right one.

What this day is not: it is not a registration drive run by the foundation, and nobody registers here. The Jada Bascom Foundation does not run a registry, does not mail swab kits, does not perform HLA typing and does not decide who is eligible. If you decide to join, Jeana will point you to the registry that serves where you live, and that registry does everything that follows. Coming over to talk costs nothing and commits you to nothing. Find the official marrow registry for your country, or donate to help JBF reach more people ready to join.