Marrow donors sign up to save lives
The way Leslie Harris, 29, of Maumelle, talks about her 6-month-old son, Samuel Ayden, is the way any new mother would talk about their baby.
“Ayden means ‘little fire’ in Irish,” Harris said. “He’s got dimples on both sides, just as deep as they come. He’s nothing but a laughing baby.”
With Harris’ upbeat attitude, it’s hard to imagine that on Sept. 21, she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, five hours before giving birth. Five months ago, she was given six months to a year to live unless she finds a bone-marrow donor.
“They [originally] gave me about 24 hours to live. They were going to do a C-section the next morning and my water broke that evening,” Harris said. “If you don’t laugh, you’ll just start crying. I’ve actually never cried once.”
Despite the rainy weather, people filed into a building at the Lakewood Village Shopping Park in North Little Rock on Sunday and joined the more than 1.7 million registered donors with the DKMS Center, to see if they were a match for Harris or others in need of bone marrow.
Crystal Cantu, 28, of Alexander, and Lydia Dreher, 29, of Little Rock, who coordinated the drive, first heard Harris’ story on a local television station.
“I am just a year younger than she is and I have a 4year-old and 7-year-old boy and I can’t imagine them not having a mommy,” Cantu said.
“I just hope that if I was in the same situation, people would do what they could to save my life.”
Harris, who’s had three rounds of chemotherapy, said she only felt sorry for herself “for about a minute.”
“Then God shot something through me, ‘ You can be an advocate. If I give you a little bit of time you can do something for yourself or for others,’” Harris said.
At the screening Sunday, swabbing stations were set up, which required donors to hold two Q-tips in their mouth for 15 seconds each. Results can take about two months, Cantu said.
“All I can say is it must be God,” Harris said of people like Cantu and Dreher. “For someone who’s never met me to go out of their way and do something so big for someone so small, it really is just a miracle to me.”
Isabel Grayson, a donor recruiter for the DKMS center in New York, said there have been more than 20 drives for Harris.
DKMS is the largest marrow donor center in the world and has facilitated more than 14,000 transplants, according to its website, dkmsamericas.org.
More than 3,000 people have registered at Harris’ drives, Grayson said.
“It’s soothing when a community comes together and says, ‘You’re not alone,’” Grayson said.
Donors must be between the ages of 18 and 55 and be in good health, Grayson said.
For those who are not eligible to donate bone marrow, Harris’ family set up the website, loveforleslie.com, for financial support.
Once someone signs up, their information goes into a national database and they agree to be contacted if anyone in the country is a match, not just Harris.
Since there is a 1-in-17,000 chance that someone is a
match, Grayson said the center strives to gain committed members to the donor registry.
“Five years down the line, if they’re called to be a match [and] they say no, they don’t realize many times a patient could die,” Grayson said. “It’s devastating for a patient to know there’s a donor out there that turned them down.”
If a match is found, a doctor decides between two procedures — stem cells collected through the blood stream or by bone-marrow extraction, where a syringe is inserted into the back of the pelvic bone while the donor is under anesthesia, Grayson said.
Though Harris has family and friends to lean on, she said all she needs is her son to keep her going.
“When I’m rocking him at night, he’s my little man,” Harris said. “He keeps me from crying. All he has to do is smile and my heart melts.”
Grayson said the next bone-marrow drive for Harris will be throughout the weekend at Our Lady of the Holy Souls Catholic Church Parish Hall, at 1003 North Tyler St., Little Rock, starting Friday from 5-7 p.m.