The last day on the Island is spent standing still and answering questions

Ten of the 45 days on this route are Bone Marrow Awareness Days, and they all work the same way. No miles are walked. Jeana is somewhere public and available, and the day is made of whatever people bring her.

The questions repeat, wherever she stands. Does it hurt. How long does it take. What does it cost. Am I too old. In Canada the answers start with Canadian Blood Services, which runs the national stem cell registry: you can join between the ages of 17 and 35, you complete an eligibility questionnaire and a consent form online, and a buccal — cheek — swab kit reaches you in the mail within one to three weeks. You swab, post it back in a prepaid envelope, and it gets HLA typed. Canadian Blood Services is also direct about who is most needed: patients are more likely to find a matching donor among people who share their ethnic ancestry, which is why it calls an ethnically diverse donor base extremely important.

Victoria is a fitting place to have that conversation. The Island's cancer centre is here, but the transplant is not. Adults in BC and the Yukon who need a bone marrow transplant are cared for by the Leukemia/Bone Marrow Transplant Program at Vancouver General Hospital, which performs over 200 a year; 14 per cent of those use an unrelated donor from a registry. That is not an abstraction to Jeana. Her granddaughter Jada Bascom needed a matched unrelated donor as an infant — not here, but through the same kind of search — and her match was Torsten Huber, a man in Germany who had joined a registry and said yes when the call came.

One thing worth being clear about, since people ask: the Jada Bascom Foundation is not a registry. It does not mail swab kits, do HLA typing, collect cells, or decide who is eligible. Nobody joins anything by talking to Jeana on a street corner. What a day like this is for is the person who goes home, looks it up that evening or the following week, and registers with Canadian Blood Services themselves.