All about Stemcord blood

Eew, that's kind of an icky heading. Anyways, we have signed up to have Baby ToBe's cord blood banked. After the initial fee, it's only $200 a year, so not very much. Of course, like insurance, you hope you never ever have to use it.

We decided to do it, even though we didn't do it for Oliver. For Oliver, it was never mentioned, and we would have had the blood banked in Florida. If you gave birth on a weekend, you couldn't even do it as FedEx doesn't pick up on the weekend. So we never really explored the possibility.

Here, when we attended the hospital tour, there was a talk on it. While the technology for using the cord blood is really still in it's infancy, there is a lot of potential. In addition, finding matching cord blood for mixed racial couples is difficult. There is also a good chance, that Oliver could use the blood. Again, we hope that will never happen.

What's interesting is that there are stem cells in other parts of the body, your bone marrow and your actual blood have it too. But cord blood is considered the best, as it is the richest in nutrients (or something) and hasn't been exposed to chemo, etc.

We are pretty happy with our decision to bank the blood. Let's hope it's one of our biggest waste of money.