I call her Alice.

She is equal parts career woman and homebody.

She is a widely respected professional. She does creative work. Advertising, perhaps? Or maybe she illustrates children's books.

She has a smart, sophisticated haircut, reminiscent of Hillary Clinton, and a wide smile.

Her house, in the suburbs of Chicago, has a yellow kitchen and an herb garden. And she makes the perfect Snickerdoodle cookie without ever glancing at the recipe.

That's how I imagine this woman, anyway.

Actually, I don't know anything about her at all.

What I know for certain is this: The woman is 59 years old. She has leukemia. And she could die without my bone marrow.

The registry

It was by accident that I signed up with the National Marrow Donor Program registry nine years ago.

As a rookie reporter at a small newspaper in Zanesville, Ohio, I was assigned to cover a bone marrow donor drive.

It costs about $50 to get your information in the registry, which pays for the tissue typing.

A local business stepped up to sponsor the first 100 donors, though, and I was among the first people to walk through the door.

“What the heck?” I remember thinking. “Hopefully I can help someone someday.”

Joining the registry is as easy as giving a vial of blood (or getting a cheek swab, in some cases).

The person who took my blood explained the importance of the registry. She stressed that I had to update them whenever my information changed, on the chance that I might be a match.

I promptly forgot about all of that.

My sister called me two months ago.

“Hey, I think someone wants your bone marrow,” she said. “Someone called today looking for you, but I wouldn't give them your new number.”

The registry.

I was a match.

The match

Some people say that finding a match is like hitting the lottery.

The patients who need bone marrow have leukemia, lymphoma and other potentially life-threatening diseases.

Only 30 percent of them find a match within their families, so the rest turn to the national registry.

The statistics, however, are not in their favor.

Right now, 11 million people are in the National Marrow Donor Program registry. Every day, more than 6,000 men, women and children turn to it, seeking a match.

However, it's incredibly difficult to match someone else's tissue type.

Doctors look for a donor who matches their patient's human leukocyte antigen tissue type. HLA are proteins — or markers — found on most cells in your body.

The immune system uses these markers to recognize which cells belong in your body and which do not. The closer the match between the patient's HLA markers and donor's, the better it is for the patient.

After I received the call saying that I could be a match, I had to answer a lengthy health screening and have some more vials of blood tested.

At that point, I was told I was a perfect match for this woman, but I still had to pass an intense physical.

There aren't any donor centers in the Coachella Valley, so the national registry directed me to City of Hope, a comprehensive cancer center in Duarte, less than two hours from here.

It was decided after one doctor's exam, four chest X-rays, a dozen vials of blood, two pregnancy tests, an EKG and one cup of pee.

Yep, I'm definitely a match.

The process

I should admit that I didn't really know what marrow was when I started this process.

I've seen people suck or scoop the buttery marrow from animal bones, a delicacy served up by chefs all over the globe.

But what about mine?

Marrow is basically spongy tissue, found in the center of bones. It creates young blood cells that pack up their bags and travel into the bloodstream when they get older.

These cells eventually mature into healthy red and white blood cells and platelets. White blood cells fight infection, red blood cells carry oxygen to tissue, platelets help blood clot.

For people who have had their own cells destroyed by high doses of chemotherapy or radiation therapy, these cells need to be replaced.

In short, my marrow would have a big job to do.

But first I had to donate it.

There are two ways people can donate their bone marrow, if they are a match for someone.

The first way, peripheral blood cell donation, is slightly more involved than giving blood. The donor's blood is passed through a machine that separates out the necessary stem cells. The remaining blood is returned through the other arm.

On the other hand, bone marrow extraction is a surgical procedure done under anesthesia.

My recipient's doctor requested the latter. They said she would fare better with the actual bone marrow, not just the cells.

At City of Hope I met with Dr. David Snyder of the hematology department to discuss my options.

If I went through with it, he would be one of the surgeons who would be performing my surgery.

“I'm here to argue on your behalf,” he said. “If you don't feel comfortable having the surgery”

“I'll do it.”

It could be painful, he said. The extraction is done from the pelvic bone with big, fat needles. I might be stiff or sore for weeks.

There are also risks, mostly associated with the anesthesia.

“Are you sure?”

“I'll do it,” I said.

Emotional time

I thought about backing out, mostly because I've never had surgery before. The whole concept of anesthesia scared me, and I didn't want to be in pain on purpose.

Watch video of Maggie as she prepares for the procedure

But each time that entered my mind, my “Alice” was also there.

The thoughts of her were almost constant, as if she had become as much a part of me as my heartbeat.

At times it almost felt like I was watching a split screen on the TV.

On the one side: My friends hosted bone marrow send-off parties for me. My boyfriend treated me to dinner at a nice Vietnamese place. I received wine and gifts and lots of warm hugs. I went to the hospital with teddy bears and balloons.

On the other side was my lady: The dying woman.

The week prior to my surgery, she had intense, almost deadly doses of chemo. The goal is to break her down, kill off her own marrow cells, make her body desperate enough to accept my marrow.

While I fretted about my first surgery, she was living with non-stop pain. While I went out to dinner, she was confined to the hospital. While I had a party, she was in isolation.

The contrast of that made me surprisingly emotional. One day I called my boyfriend at work, sobbing.

“I think she's started her chemo,” I said.

“I know,” he said in his most soothing voice.

“There will be a lot of people going into surgery that day,” I said. “And out of all of them, I'm the healthy one.”

“I know.”

“I'm so lucky,” I said.

“You are.”

The surgery

The day of my surgery, I arrived at City of Hope at 6 a.m. where my transplant coordinator was waiting.

I changed into a gown and blue paper booties. I received an IV. My boyfriend covered me with a blanket from home.

The nurse patted my hand.

“You're doing a good thing,” she said.

The anesthesiologist came to my side and asked if I had any questions. I'm pretty sure I was green with nerves.

“What if I'm so disoriented when I wake up that I have a heart attack?”

“What if I get knocked out so quickly that I fall backward and crack my head open?”

“What if I wake up in the middle of it? Jenny McCarthy woke up when she was getting her breast implants, you know.”

He answered all my questions, even the crazy ones.

Then I was wheeled into the operating room where I slipped into unconsciousness.

I was completely out, face-down on the table, while the surgeons inserted needles the size of cocktail straws into my pelvis.

Their tools were like divining rods. They filled vial after vial, each one emptied into a beaker. The lot of it was then whisked to prevent coagulation.

“I feel like I'm stirring spaghetti sauce,” joked a nurse. That's what Desert Sun photographer Marilyn Chung told me after the surgery.

When the beaker was full, the marrow was strained through a sieve to filter out stray bone fragments.

Then all of the liquid was poured into bags, packed into a cooler and flown to my lady.

My extraction was scheduled to take two hours, but the surgeons pulled 1.36 liters of bone marrow from my pelvis in just 40 minutes.

They said my bones were “juicy.”

I'm oddly proud of that.

The recovery

I spent a solid week on the couch, soothing myself with potato and leek soup, soy ice cream, fresh pomegranates.

I was also armed with a stack of books, loaned by friends who know my secret vice of everything trashy and vampire.

I also had a bottle of Vicodin and a puppy who refused to doze anywhere but on my lap.

The pain wasn't excruciating, just uncomfortable and easily dulled with painkillers. But if I moved too quick or turned the wrong way, it felt as if I had been cracked across the pelvis with a mallet.

I have four small holes on my lower back where the needles entered my body. They're healing over, though, and they shouldn't leave scars.

Soon there won't be any reminder of my surgery at all.

I still can't understand how something can have such a minimal effect on my body, but such a profound effect on my mind and soul.

I am so proud and grateful.

Maybe I won't change history or create world peace or write the Great American Novel. But I can say, at least once in my life, I had a mighty effect on another human being.

I want to meet her.

If all goes well with her health, I'll receive updates every few months. After a year, if she agrees to it, the registry will facilitate an introduction.

Eventually we could see each other face to face.

In the meantime, it's difficult. It's hard to be intimately involved with another person in this way and still know very little about her. I feel a deep and intense connection with someone but with whom?

I struggle with the fact that I can be a perfect match with someone on a most basic level, but remain a stranger.

So I just call her Alice.

And I pray for her recovery.

Maggie Downs is a features reporter for The Desert Sun. She can be reached at maggie.downs@thedesertsun.com or 778-6435.