A bone marrow transplant happens when someone's bone marrow is not working correctly, or for any other reasons that they might need one. There are two ways to do a bone marrow transplant, and I am going to tell you about each of them:
1. The most common way is to put the donor under general anesthesia, and then the procedure will begin once the donor is totally asleep. The person doing the Bone Marrow Harvest (A Bone Marrow Harvest is the phrase a doctor uses for a bone marrow collection) will use a tiny little drill or needle to go into your hip bone, and then they will collect some of your marrow. The amount of marrow they will take depends on the host's body weight. After the collection, the marrow will be cleaned, and then put into the host's body. Then the marrow should start producing in the host's body!
2. Another way that they can do a transplant is by taking blood from the donor, and filtering it through a machine that sorts out the stem cells from the blood. This is known as a stem cell transplant, but it is not as commonly used as the bone marrow transplant. Before they collect the stem cells, they have to give the donor a shot called Neupogen that will bring your stem cells into the blood stream. It may take multiple days of collecting stem cells to have enough to put into the host, and then they should start to create marrow!