Shelton: the only city in Mason County, and the last one before the Capitol

Shelton was incorporated in 1890 and named for David Shelton, a delegate to the territorial legislature. It is the county seat and the only incorporated city in Mason County: 6.11 square miles, a population of about 10,400, sitting on Oakland Bay, which reaches the wider Puget Sound through Hammersley Inlet. The city calls itself two things — Christmastown USA, a name the Shelton-Mason County Chamber of Commerce began using in 1955 for the volume of fir and pine grown around it, and Gateway to the Olympics. Walking in from the north, she is coming out through that gate rather than into it.

Mason Health, the public hospital district that runs Mason General Hospital on Mountain View Drive, was created in 1968 as Public Hospital District No. 1 of Mason County, and is still owned and governed by local citizens. The hospital is designated a Critical Access Hospital. That is a Medicare designation for small rural hospitals, and its conditions are about scale and scope: no more than twenty-five acute-care inpatient beds, emergency care available around the clock, and an annual average length of stay of ninety-six hours or less. It describes what a hospital this size is built to hold, and for how long.

A hospital of that size runs the blood count. The transplant that a bad blood count can eventually lead to is done somewhere else, at a specialist center. The route 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. The distance between those two facts is most of what this walk is about. The treatment is concentrated in a few places. The donors who make it possible are not.

Torsten Huber, the German donor whose marrow went to Jada Bascom, did not live near a transplant center either. He had joined a registry years before she needed him. Joining is done by mail from wherever a person happens to live: NMDP mails a free swab kit, and it goes back in a prepaid envelope. The Jada Bascom Foundation does not run a registry, does not type anyone's tissue, and does not decide who is eligible. It can only tell you where the registry is.