Beaufort County Community College hosts a bone marrow-donor registration drive tomorrow for BCCC students only – and another drive May 1 for the public.

The registration drive at BCCC runs from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.

Betsie Letterle, Be the Match coordinator for eastern North Carolina, said it is unfortunate that many people in need of bone-marrow transplants are unable to find donors whose bone marrow matches theirs.

“This is why it is so critical to register more people, and it’s wonderful that the college is sponsoring this,” she said. “Only about 25 percent of a patient’s family is usually a donor match.”

According to Letterle, it’s a tissue match, not a blood-type match, that’s needed. She also said many people have misconceptions about bone-marrow transplants because of watching TV shows like “House” or films like “Seven Pounds,” which shows a donor undergoing surgery without anesthesia.

“Majority of the time, all the donor goes through to donate is a procedure like giving blood,” she said. “And the other times, when surgery is called for, the donor is under anesthesia.”

Letterle was at N.C. State University on Monday for a bone marrow-transplant registration drive with an NCSU freshman volunteer who would not have been there had she not received a bone-marrow transplant.

John Rebholz helped put the registration drive together, too. He said one of the reasons for the drive is because Beaufort County resident Dave Wheelock received a successful bone-marrow transplant last year.

“He’s actually in New Jersey today, seeing his grandchild that was just born,” Rebholz said. “So, you can see that the bone-marrow transplant saved his life, and he’s seeing good things today.”

Rebholz said the registration drive is being conducted in Wheelock’s honor. Organizers try to put on two such events a year. To be eligible to donate bone marrow, donor candidates have to be at least 18 years old and no older than 60 years old.

The registration process, Rebholz said, takes about 10 to 15 minutes.

“It’s just some paperwork and a cotton swab on the side of the cheek,” he said. “Nothing is actually taken place until somewhere down the road when the donor actually becomes a match to someone.”

Rebholz said the procedure used to harvest bone marrow used to be a surgical procedure.

“It still is in some aspects,” he said. “But majority of the it is like giving blood. There are some medical restrictions to donors. However, if you’ve had certain kinds of cancer, you can still give.”

According to a website, www.medicinenet.com/leukemia, bone-marrow and stem-cell transplants are the only known cure, or treatment, for several types of diseases. Such transplants can cure blood cancers, like leukemia.

“Without healthy bone marrow, the patient is not able to fight off infection and prevent bleeding,” Rebholz said. “And some diseases are primarily found in children.”

Rebholz said the majority of bone-marrow transplants conducted for residents in eastern North Carolina are performed at the University of North Carolina Medical Center in Chapel Hill. The transplant is a process that takes just minutes for the donor, but months of recovery for the recipient, according to Rebholz.

“Once the transplant takes place, the recipient has to stay within a five-minute drive from the hospital for 90 to 100 days,” Rebholz said. “The reason for that is, just in case something goes wrong while their body is adapting to the donor’s blood type, they can easily get to the hospital.”

To find out more about bone-marrow transplants, visit www.marrow.org.