Where British Columbia does its bone marrow transplants

The Leukemia/Bone Marrow Transplant Program of British Columbia is based at Vancouver General Hospital. Its inpatient unit occupies Towers 15 and 16 of the Jim Pattison Pavilion at 899 West 12th Avenue; its outpatient day care unit is the Krall Centre, on the sixth floor of the Leon Blackmore Pavilion at 855 West 12th, a few doors along the same street. The programme is accredited by the Foundation for the Accreditation of Cellular Therapy and by Health Canada.

It is a provincial service rather than a local one. UBC's Division of Hematology describes it as providing care for all adults in British Columbia and the Yukon who require a bone marrow transplant, and for 80 per cent of adults in the province with acute leukemia — annually performing more than two hundred bone marrow transplants and evaluating approximately a hundred new acute leukemia patients. The conditions it treats are the familiar reasons a person needs a stranger's marrow: acute lymphoblastic, acute myeloid and chronic myeloid leukemia, lymphoma, multiple myeloma, myelodysplastic syndromes, severe aplastic anemia and germ cell tumours.

A transplant programme can do everything right and still be stuck, because the one thing it cannot manufacture is a matched donor. Canadian Blood Services coordinates searches inside Canada and with international registries — a pool of over 40 million donors from around the world across over 80 participating countries — and even against a number that large, a match for a patient in Canada can only be found about 50 per cent of the time. Everything upstream of that figure is ordinary people deciding, on an ordinary day, to swab the inside of their cheek.

Jada Bascom's donor was found in Germany. By the foundation's account, Torsten Huber joined the German registry at a donor drive more than a year before Jada was born — no connection to her family, and no way of knowing that a child would one day depend on it. The walk stops here on the public pavement of West 12th, outside a building where that same arithmetic is running today for somebody whose family is doing the maths right now.