Can I sign up to be put on the bone marrow donor registry?

No, not for the marrow drive.

You must be 18 years old to sign up the the NMDP (National Marrow Donor Program), also called the "Be the Match Program". They are the registry that matches donors with patients. If it is a family member, the age is reduced to 14.

Some additional information:

To register, you give either a cotton DNA mouth swab, or give a sample of blood. They then take your sample, analyze it, and register it into their database.

Once you've registered, they'll call you if you are a potential match. Odds are based on your ethnicity. They can be anywhere between 1 in 20,000 for common DNA types (Caucasian) or upwards of one in a million for mixed races, which is why minorities are especially encouraged to donate.

If you are selected as a potential match, they'll do additional blood tests to narrow it down. This will tell them if you are a suitable candidate (about 1 in 200 odds). This depends on how closely you match vs. how badly they need the transplant.

When they take your bone marrow, it's usually from your blood. For 5 days, they give you injections that boost your white blood cell production. On the 5th day, they hook you up to a machine that filters out your blood for the marrow cells. The other method is the surgical one, where they give you anesthesia and remove marrow by inserting 4 or so needles into your pelvis. This is a secondary procedure, and they would much rather take it from your blood if they can.

Hope this helps, it's great that you want to donate, but you'll have to wait a few months until you're 18. Chances are that the patient will still be looking for a match, so you never know, it might be you.

what I even have considered properly that's kinda painful and that they drill via a bone and extracts the purple marrow that produces purple blood cells and placed it in somebody's bone the place the marrow is undesirable or something like that