Be The Match Registry donor advocates blood stem cell gift
When a person is diagnosed with a blood cancer such as leukemia or lymphoma, a blood stem cell transplant can save his or her life. Doctors first look to the patient’s family for a lifesaving match. If that doesn’t work, a matching donor needs to be found elsewhere.
Corey Read of Magnolia signed up to be a donor with the Be The Match Registry while in seminary. Five years later she missed a call saying she was a match. She explains that she had actually forgotten about signing up as a donor. When she listened to her voicemail it said, “You’ve been matched with somebody, and we’d love to talk with you to see if you’re still interested in donating.”
She remembers being in a bit of a panic and thinking, “I’m going to have to have surgery. They will have to scrape my bone marrow and this is going be an expensive thing.” In addition, she now had a little girl who would be turning 1 in a week and there was a lot to think about.
A few days later she received another call and learned about her match. “When they told me it was a girl — a little girl — I had no doubt in my mind I would donate, because I would want somebody to do the same for my little girl.”
Read is director of the Wesley Foundation at South Arkansas University at Magnolia. The Wesley Foundation, part of the United Methodist Campus Ministry, is partnering with the Ozark Mission Project (OMP), also associated with the United Methodist Church, to bring awareness to the registry and sign up donors.
Bailey Faulkner, executive director of the project, says that the two organizations often partner on mission trips for college students in January, but with the pandemic they decided that a donor drive would be a safer alternative. “We realized that the best thing that we could do was not to gather a bunch of college students from different campuses together.”
Faulkner had helped with a donor drive before and when she spoke with Read, she said it just seemed like a perfect project.
Every three minutes someone is diagnosed with a blood disorder, Faulkner says. “We felt that this was so critical. They need people ages 18 to 44 and that’s part of the demographic that we work with — ages 18 to about 26.” The drive will focus on Arkansas college students through campus Wesley Foundations.
The likelihood of becoming a match can be 23%-77%, depending on ethnic background. Because the genetic markers used in matching donor to patient are inherited, donors are more likely to match a patient with the same ethnic background.
Faulkner is hoping to bring in a broad range of new registrations, especially people of color. “African-Americans have a less chance of finding a match,” she says. “Twenty-three percent actually is the average. So we’re excited about the possibility of finding a whole bunch of people to join the registry.”
When a patient finds a match with a donor, usually the patient’s unhealthy blood stem cells are replaced with healthy ones from the donor. The healthy blood stem cells are collected from either marrow, umbilical cord or peripheral blood stem cells.
“It turns out the surgery is actually not the most common way to collect the blood stem cells,” Read says.
According to Be The Match, 79% of the time a patient’s doctor requests a peripheral blood stem cell donation, a nonsurgical outpatient procedure.
“It’s like donating plasma,” Read says. “I did have to take some injections in the week leading up to the donation to help my body produce more blood stem cells so that when they took some out, my body didn’t go into depletion.”
Read donated her blood stem cells in Houston and the little girl in New Jersey, a 3-year-old at the time, received them the next day.
The process for signing up for the registry is simple. The easiest way to order a donor test kit is to text luvurneighbor to 61474, Faulkner says. “Everyone uses their phone anyway. They use their phone to read the newspaper. They use their phone to connect with their family and friends. Why not use your phone to text this number and do something that makes a huge impact?” She says the test kit is sent to your house, and takes less than 10 seconds to use. “You swab your cheek and you send it back and see if there is a chance of becoming a match.”
After waiting the required year and signing consent forms agreeing to communication, Read received an email from the little girl’s mother. “It just brought me to tears because it literally changed the course of her life.”
Read still keeps up with her match. “She celebrated her fifth birthday in October and is doing great. She was just cleared to be able to receive vaccines and she’s getting caught up on all the vaccines that she needs. I think she’s finally able to be a semi-normal 5-year-old little girl now and not in and out of the hospital.”
“Our hope,” Faulkner says, “is that people realize that even though we can’t gather together, we can still make a huge impact. We can still all do something.”
The donor drive will continue until Easter (April 4) and will include an in-person event March 16 and 17 at Bale Chevrolet on Chenal Parkway for donors to register. For more information about the Be The Match donor drive call The Ozark Mission Project at (501) 664-3232.