thelma magazine's blog

So, Thelma is made almost entirely at a coworking space in Richmond called Inspire9. The people at Inspire9 are incredibly fun, even more supportive, and pretty good at playing Dance Dance Revolution, Little Big Planet, and shooting Nerf guns at each other. They’re also an unbelievably talented bunch of people who make awesome suff for the intrwebs.

Every second Friday, these people (we call ourselves coworkers) attend an event called Jelly. Basically a Jelly is an excuse to play hopscotch all around Melbourne and work from a different place every fortnight, which in turn means hanging out with different collections of people, eating lunch at different cafes, and partying at different places after work every second Friday. It’s kind of amazing. And honestly the inspiration to keep working on Thelma would be so much harder to find if I hadn’t have stumbled into coworking at Inspire9 and at Jelly meetups around Melbourne.

Jelly was started by a guy in New York called Amit Gupta. He’s a pretty awesome guy. He inspired a whole movement of people running around to different offices and cafes in cities around the world, meeting new people and mixing up their work routines. He also started a really, really awesome website called Photojojo which is packed with awesome photography projects and gear, and just cool photo-related everything.

Amit has Leukaemia. 

He found out recently. You can read his blogpost about it [here].

There are drives happening around the world to try to find a bone marrow match for him. 

It seems in the US it’s pretty easy to find out if you’re a bone marrow match. All you have to do is swab your cheek with a cotton bud and send it off to get tested.

The crew at Inspire9 have spent the past fortnight trying extremely hard to get some sort of swabbing system happening at the coworking space tomorrow during our Melbourne Jelly meetup. Unfortunately in Australia, this isn’t possible and all donors have to go through the process of donating blood to find out if they’re a match.

So we tried with all of our energy to get a Red Cross van to come out to the space to help us donate blood. This also proved much harder than we anticipated. It’s pretty disappointing that as a first-world country with so much resource, it’s so incredibly hard to arrange to find out if you’re a suitable bone marrow donor for someone. Read [the post about this on the Inspire9 blog] to hear the frustration behind what we’ve been through to try to find a way to see if any of us are a suitable match for Amit.

So, tomorrow we’re heading down to the local donor centre to give blood.

I’m completely terrified, as I’ve had a severe needle phobia since I was a child. Let’s be honest, I will be crying. I’m not sure how I’m going to get through the experience without becoming a blubbering ball of sogginess and snot. But the idea that by going through a little bit of discomfort and upset could save someone’s life is just amazing. So I’m going to do my best.

What can Thelma readers do?

Well, if you’re interested in helping out - please retweet, re-blog, and forward Amit’s blog post around the web as much as you can to try to raise awareness for cancer research. So many of us are affected by cancer, either personally or via someone close to us. This is a massive issue, and the more awareness and support for cancer research that we can generate, then the closer we’ll get to finding more solutions.

It’s pretty daunting, but if you’re interested in trying to donate blood and to find out if you’re a bone marrow match for Amit or someone else out there who might be in need get in touch with your local Red Cross donor centre and make an appointment! [click here to find your nearest centre].

I hope you’re all well!

- Kealey