Get your photo on Ultrabrown
DJ Kunal is hosting a lounge music party + marrow registration drive Sunday evening in Manhattan. Enjoy the music, have a drink, get swabbed. Take a photo at any marrow drive with swab in cheek, and we’ll post it here on Ultrabrown. Mail photos to 
. It’s Sunday July 8, 4-8pm, Pianos, 158 Ludlow between Rivington/Stanton.
My friend Sameer Bhatia, 31, was just diagnosed with leukemia. Sameer and I hung out several times in Bombay, where he has family and a software team. He was on a punishing schedule, flying to Bombay monthly and spending two weeks in each country. Like my friend’s brother Vinay, Sameer also needs a marrow transplant.
(For those surfing at work: a video starts playing automatically after the jump.)
Vinay’s chemo is not working and he needs a transplant to live. The really fucked up thing about Vinay’s story is that he beat the 1-in-20,000 odds and actually found a match, but the donor changed his mind. Up to 70% of donors back out because of the discomfort involved.
“Among African-Americans, there is a deep distrust of the medical establishment due to government-run experiments conducted on them in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s…” [Link]
70% of the time, it’s a week of bloating and then giving blood; 30% of the time, it’s two quarter-inch incisions, some soreness, and you’re back to work two days later. But these are really minor discomforts compared to letting someone die.
… it is easy and painless. When I donated I went in a week ahead of time to donate a pint of blood to be given back to me during the procedure. The day of the transplant I was put under for what seemed like a few minutes, but was actually a few hours. I had two incisions on my hip bone (left and right). Each was about 1/4 inch long and had a piece of tape over it. Two days later I was back at work. No big deal. Incidentally, the patient is alive and well. [Link]
Here are Kal Penn, Sunkrish Bala and Karmacy demonstrating the swab (refresh the page to see all the videos).
The remarkably well-organized Help Vinay campaign has mobilized or listed a massive number of registration drives:
July 5-8, Edison, NJ
July 5-7, Washington DC
July 6, Santa Clara, CA
July 6, New Brunswick, NJ
July 7, Cambridge, MA
July 7 & 8, Cincinatti, OH
July 7, Austin, Texas
July 7, Raleigh, North Carolina
July 7, Pomona, NY
July 7 & 8, Morganville, NJ
July 7, Santa Clara, CA
July 7, New Brunswick, NJ
July 7, Columbus, Ohio
July 7, Nashua, NH
July 7, Artesia, CA
July 7, Flushing, NY
July 7, Canoga Park, CA
July 7, Irvine, CA
July 8, Raleigh, North Carolina
July 8, Mountain View, CA
July 8, Cleveland OH
July 8, Las Vegas, NV
Please go get swabbed or at the very least, register by mail. The mail option, which takes 12 weeks to process, may not be soon enough to help Vinay, but it could help Sameer and will definitely help future leukemia sufferers.
This could strike anyone in your family, and at a young age.
Let’s get this done.
on Friday, July 6th, 2007, 5:56 pm in Events, Health, Video clips › 
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Again I ask, how does one do this in BBay? Does anyone know?
i’m gonna go and get swabbed (and wouldn’t default if it was me), but only in hopes of meeting a cute indian chick.
and as i think about it, they should have organized this drive around a speed dating event or something dulhan-meeting-related. mad people would come out for that.
finally, Pianos may be a bit too “edgy” for the average indian in NYC. i certainly hope there won’t be any indie rock playing. ugh.
JB- Check out this site for more information. Hopefully it provides you with a starting point. Link via Wired.com
My dad always worked 18 to 20hrs a day all his life even when was seventy years old..He always slept at 4am in the morning and never ate properly and always ate one meal a day mostly…he always told us we need to eat to live and not live to eat..He got aml luekemia and passed away.
Looks like Ur friends sameer , vinay had hectic schedules and sleepless nites , may be the disease is associated with less sleep and working too hard and too long..
Also scientifically body makes platelets etc., in the morning so morning breakfast is critical I read somewhere..it helps blood makes all its cells..and sometimes it is also because some genes mutate and stop making necessary factors for blast cells to mature..key is to eat good, eat healthy, sleep well.
Doctors told us my dad will not live beyond march 2005 and stopped treating him but he survived until october end 2005. me and my sister treated my dad ourselves with the help of an Indian doctor who had his own lab and made powders and we three would talk and discuss dosage and give that incombination with western drugs to my dad after reading on internet side effects of each drug and and trying out different cancer medications on my dad. my dad started making his own platelets which was a miracle and for sometime his cancer went off, I will talk to that doctor and give his phone number to vinay and sameer. All the doctors at jaslok and apollo hospital were shocked that we three kept our dad alive for so long despite them saying he will die in three weeks.
u never know. Also we never told our dad he relapsed..he always thought his cancer was in remission..that was another reason why he was very optimistic and we made sure my dad was in great spirits all the time. that also probably kept him alive for long.
I will talk to that Indian doctor who is a doctor and a chemist with his own lab and give his number to vinay and sameer if they are interested. we looked at medical reports and talked to a lot of patients , he was able to cure many young patients..I think reasons why he failed with my dad was he was too old..u never know he might work miracles with vinay and sameer if they are interested. I will get the doctors number and pass it on to vinay and sameer if they are interested.
Sometimes a story neednt be explicitly ‘brown’ to merit sharing on this forum. I realize there is a hesitation among desis about the marrow registry - so felt it would be appropriate to share this story here. It’s a story of a beautiful love but it does not shirk away from the gory details. There is graphic video footage of a surgical procedure, and the author writes of his recuperation after his donation. I have had qualms about ‘what if I am called. will I be able to go through with the procedure?’. Strangely, watching the whole process and reading Mr Gauer tell of his experience fills me with tranquility. I am not afraid. Do take a look if you can spare a few minutes.