The Cheekswab Blog

79 New Donors for Janet Liang at GMU and CTPC! Team Janet East Coast February Total 347!

With bone marrow drives at ODPC (Sunday), GMU (Thursday), and Chesterbrook Taiwanese Presbyterian Church (CTPC) on Friday and Sunday, this past week was pretty busy. But with the help of the GMU Vietnamese Student Association, the staff and members of CTPC and friends who volunteered at each of the drives, 79 new donors were registered this week in honor of Janet Liang. By adding CTPC to the Team Janet East Coast drives from UMCP, UMBC, GWU, EVMS and GMU, that brings the total new East Coast registrants for Janet Liang to 347 people!

George Mason University Marrow Drive, Thursday, 2/23

Swabbing at George Mason University

Swabbing at George Mason University

I want to give a special shout out to Vinh Phan, a GMU student who really went above and beyond the call of duty to make the GMU drive a success. We had originally planned to host a drive at GMU as part of the multi-school Team Janet East Coast initiative on Valentines Day (which registered donors from UMCP, UMBC, GWU and EVMS) but unfortunately Read more..

ODPC Drive Recap: 254 Registered Donors!

ODPC Drive Volunteers

ODPC Drive Volunteers

The bone marrow drive at Open Door Presbyterian Church on Sunday was an amazing display of generosity by not only the ODPC congregation but the community at large. In addition to the incredible response of members of ODPC, there were a number of visitors and volunteers at the drive who had heard of Andrew's cause via social media or the Internet and decided to come out to the drive to help or join the registry.

Joining Andrew's Army at ODPC

Joining Andrew's Army at ODPC

The amazing part about this drive was how invested ODPC was in the drive's promotion and success. Often times at churches marrow drives can become something of an afterthought or minor bullet on the itinerary. But ODPC, with its over 700 weekly attendees, went above and beyond the call of duty (in a very short 3 week period) to do all that they could to run a successful drive.

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UVA GCF Bone Marrow Drive: 79 New Donors!

On Friday a few friends and I had the pleasure of running a bone marrow drive at Grace Christian Fellowship at the University of Virginia. The response from GCF was overwhelming.

View from the Swabbing Table

View from the Swabbing Table

As the first "official" cheekswab drive, there were a lot of unknowns going into Friday. I was told that a reasonable estimate for attendees was in the ballpark of anywhere from 60-80 people, based on previous events of a similar nature. It's always a difficult exercise to make any worthwhile estimates about the number of kits needed for a group of x size because the response can be so variable. For example, the first drive I was ever a part of was coordinated through a different bone marrow organization. The drive was scheduled for a church congregation of 100 people, and the drive organizer was told that for a congregation of 100 people, we'd be lucky to get 10 registrations. For whatever reason, more experience seems to set the level of expectation lower rather than higher.

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