Gift of Life Recipient: Julie Kaufman
I was completely shocked in early 2018 to learn that I had leukemia. I was generally healthy and fit, and the diagnosis seemed to come from out of the blue. It was life-threatening. Chemotherapy could give me a little time, but only a bone marrow transplant could offer the possibility of a cure. We looked worldwide for a donor, but there was not a single person on the registry who was a suitable donor for me. Clearly, we need many, many more people to register!
Luckily for me, there is a protocol for having a family member be a “half-match” or haploidentical donor, and one of my sons became my donor. I am now almost four years post-transplant and am living a completely normal, healthy, active life.
Signing up for the registry just requires a quick cheek swab. Please do this small act of tikkun olam and sign up. Thank you.
Gift of Life Donor: Alex Lyon
About 15 years ago, while at a music festival in Chicago, I registered as a potential bone marrow donor, giving my contact information and a cheek swab to an organization called DKMS. In May of 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, I received the call that I was a match for a young adult with cancer. While the only information I was given about the recipient was his age and sex, there was no doubt in my mind that I would agree to take the next steps toward donation.
In June, I traveled to Berkeley for a day of medical exams and blood tests to ensure that I was healthy enough to proceed with the donation. Once I was cleared, the appointment for the donation was set for mid-July.
There are two procedures used by DKMS – bone marrow donation, which is used in about 25% of cases, most often when the patient is a child, and Peripheral Blood Stem Cell Donation (PSBC). Because my patient was a young adult, I had the PSBC procedure. PBSC is a non-surgical procedure that collects stem cells via a patient’s bloodstream. Four days prior to the donation day, a home health nurse gave me daily shots of filgrastim, a synthetic protein that speeds up the production of white blood cells. The injections helped ensure that I would have more blood stem cells to donate to the patient.
On my donation day, I received the last of my filgrastim injections and had a catheter inserted into my neck. For the PSBC procedure, I was hooked up to a machine for six hours that filtered out my blood stem cells and returned the remaining blood to my body. In a normal world, my donation would immediately go to the patient, but due to COVID-19 my donation was cryopreserved for two weeks for the safety of the recipient.
While I was exhausted and sore, with flu-like symptoms from both the filgrastim injections and the PBSC, I knew that anything I was suffering was nothing compared to what the patient was likely going through. I’ve since connected with my recipient – he’s cancer free and we hope to meet in the future!
It was a deeply rewarding experience to be able to help another person in this special way and I would certainly do this all again. I highly encourage any healthy adult between the ages of 18 and 60 to register — you never know who could be waiting for your help through donation!
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