BY BOBBY MAGILL • Originally published in the Fort Collins Coloradoan — May 17, 2010

Dennis Houska, owner of Houska Automotive on Riverside Avenue in Fort Collins, has a new mission in life.

Like an undercover agent, he often plays the middle man in what sometimes seems like a Hollywood thriller-style life-and-death operation ferrying bone marrow from one end of the continent to the other.

He gets a call one day, hops a plane a few days later, makes the bone marrow pick-up on one coast, then hops another flight to make the drop on another coast - all to save the life of someone in desperate need of a transplant.

"It's kind of 'secret agent,' but it's not," Houska said.

Having raised money to fight cancer and donated his own marrow to a save a California boy’s life, Houska signed up as a volunteer bone marrow courier for the National Marrow Donor Program last fall. Since then, he has ferried marrow across the country nine times.

As a courier, Houska is given his assignment about a week in advance. He flies into the city where the marrow donation is made, collects the donation, double-checks the donation’s codes and numbers, then races to the airport in a cab, often with his destination far on the other side of the country.

Time is precious, he said, because the recipient’s life depends on getting the donation as soon as possible.

“I did one in Lebanon, N.H.,” he said. “I had to hire a driver to take me to Manchester and then flew to Utah. I was gone three nights.”

Houska said he was on assignment in Detroit last Christmas when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to explode Northwest Airlines Flight 253.

“You could just feel the tension in the airport a little more,” he said.

The marrow, he said, is kept in a small cooler as he travels.

“You have to keep it right with you,” he said. “You can’t put it in the overhead (bin). I put it under the seat in front of me. You can’t tell people what you’re doing. You can’t tell other passengers.”

Really, he just can’t draw attention to himself, he said. If a passenger asks what he’s up to, he’ll say, but he won’t volunteer the information in conversation.

Nor can he tell the donor where he’s going or the marrow recipient where he came from.

Often, he picks up the donation from a lab and only talks to lab technicians. Sometimes, he said, he meets a donor’s family members, but he almost never encounters a marrow recipient.

“A lot of them are real curious,” Houska said.

Though he almost never gets to connect personally with those giving or receiving the marrow donation, he said he does it because he feels like he’s facilitating the saving of a person’s life.

“I’m maybe just a little link in helping somebody save someone’s life,” he said.

Since his own marrow donation saved a life, Houska has been busy raising money for the fight against cancer with the Houska Houska 5K run since then.

The next run will be Memorial Day, May 31, and proceeds from the race will benefit the Poudre Valley Hospital Cancer Center and Bone Marrow Registration Program.