The ‘gift of life’
Yale soccer player Sarah Jordan celebrates with California man she saved by donating stem cells for transplant
“Sarah is an amazing soul. To see the person, to see the person ... I’ve read about how the body deals with shock and it’s either fight or flight or you freeze. My body froze. You don’t know what to do.”
— Michael Silberstein, on meeting Sarah Jordan, whose donated stem cells helped save him
When they finally saw each other last week in cyberspace, after a year of waiting and wondering, their eyes welled with tears. Sarah Jordan put her hands to her face in New Jersey, Michael Silberstein did the same in California, and for a moment there were no words — just a flood of emotion representing the power of unconditional generosity.
Jordan, a Yale soccer player who had anonymously donated stem cells in 2019 to save a man she didn’t know, giggled nervously at first and Silberstein, sitting beside his wife and 6-year-old daughter, began a conversation of gratitude and hope.
“Thank you for the gift of life,” he said. “This is my family. This is who you gave a daddy back to.”
Separated by nearly 3,000 miles, Jordan and Silberstein were connected for this conversation through Zoom. They remain connected, forever, by DNA and the most inspiring human cooperation.
The virtual introduction was a “we” moment in an increasingly “I” society. It was the strength of spirit and science over leukemia, a victory for living in appreciation for something beyond one’s own existence. It was a reminder of what can be accomplished by taking small initial steps with potential to make an indelible impact elsewhere, anywhere, at any time.
The conversation lasted about 45 minutes and “Be The Match,” the organization that runs a national bone marrow and stem cell donor registry, released a five-minute montage Tuesday in celebration of “Giving Day” and another successful transplant.
Jordan gave.
Silberstein lived.
Now they share.
“Sarah is an amazing soul,” said Silberstein, diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia on Oct. 23, 2018. “To see the person ... I’ve read about how the body deals with shock and it’s either fight or flight or you freeze. My body froze. You don’t know what to do.”
So as they talked, they cried. It was beautiful. The preservation of life and the end of suffering is the magic that happens through donorship and transplants. The blossoming of new relationships, the extension of families, can be side effects to successful procedures.
Donors and recipients reserve the option to remain anonymous, but both parties were aligned in hopes for a post-transplant meeting as soon as the mandatory one-year waiting period expired. The procedure took place Nov. 13, 2019, with Sarah having stem cells extracted from her blood in Boston and rushed to Los Angeles for Silberstein to receive hours later.
The zoom call took place 375 days later. Sarah, a senior from Mahwah, N.J., has moved further toward completion of her degree and soccer career at Yale. Michael’s body has accepted the cells and is on track for a full recovery after an arduous journey of illness and fear.
“Just putting a face to the name, seeing it was a real person, a real family, a real community that I helped out, was very surreal,” Jordan said. “I didn’t know what to expect.
“And then you could see he was emotional and I was nervous.
And then he’s crying, I’m crying, his wife’s crying, my parents are crying. It was really emotional.”
As a Yale freshman in the spring of 2018, Jordan joined the registry by having her cheek swabbed for DNA during the university’s annual drive in honor of Mandi Schwartz, a Class of 2010 hockey player who died of leukemia in 2011. She was drawn to the tents and volunteers in orange shirts on Yale’s Cross Campus, all part of an initiative aided by “Get in the Game, Save a Life.”
Jordan, now one of 22 million people on the registry, was iden
tified in fall 2019 as one of four preliminary matches for a person in need. She submitted to follow-up bloodwork and tissue analysis until she was labeled the best match, and she was asked to donate. She did not hesitate.
All Jordan knew of Silberstein was that he was 51 years old, male and living in the United States. All Silberstein knew of Jordan was that she was female, 20 and living in the U.S.
“The way I thought was, there’s a man, same age as my dad, and I would hope if my dad were in this position that someone would do this for him,” Jordan said. “There are injections [in preparation] and the needle when you give blood. I view that as a very small price to pay in comparison to what the patient is going through.
“That’s how I rationalized it. Thinking about it those two ways made it a no-brainer.”
“Be The Match” has facilitated over 100,000 blood stem cell transplants over 35 years, with 6,426 in 2019 alone.
Silberstein’s life depended on one, a year into a battle that began with mild symptoms that rapidly worsened as his condition remained unidentified. By the time of diagnosis, Silberstein said, he was on the brink of a stroke or organ failure.
He spent five days in intensive care in late October 2018 and was then hospitalized for six weeks. He saw one specialist in Hous
ton, another in Los Angeles, in the following months. There were collaborative efforts for treatment, with chemotherapy sessions lasting six weeks apiece.
After each treatment, Silberstein would return home for a month or so, technically in remission. The cancer returned, vigorously, about three months after his final treatment.
There were no other options. Radiation to essentially eradicate his body of his own stem cells and prepare for new ones — while the search for a match went on — began.
“This was DEFCON5, period, bar none,” said Silberstein, who was raised on Long Island, attended Drexel University and has been in Los Angeles since. “Once you go through this, you have to have a transplant because you’re done.”
That was late August 2019 — about a month before Jordan’s junior soccer season. Part of the preparation for donating involves five consecutive days of injecting Neupogen, a drug that facilitates greater stem cell production.
It is a draining process. Jordan’s first injection was Nov. 9, the day of Yale’s final game. She played — one of her better games, she said — in a 1-1 tie with Brown.
Four days later, she spent six hours at Massachusetts General Hospital, needle in each arm, blood cycling in and out of her body and being processed for cell gathering, as Silberstein prepped for his own procedure in LA
“I was never in pain,” Jordan said. “I was a little tired and run down the next day. I donated on a Wednesday, and that Saturday I went down to Princeton for the Yale-Princeton football game. I was totally fine.”
Silberstein’s prognosis remained up in the air for months. The stem cells didn’t take for several weeks and, even when they did there were enormous challenges with a weakened immune system. He was hospitalized twice, once with pneumonia, once with a viral infection in his bladder, setbacks that “rock your soul,” he said. There were numerous other health complications, and immeasurable anxiety, until about the five-month mark.
He has improved weekly since. No longer shackled by debilitating illness, he walks a lot, goes to the beach, flies kites. His sense of humor is something to behold.
He hasn’t worked since the ordeal began, but he is returning to the same software company, in a different role, beginning Dec. 14. He’s active with his synagogue.
The guy who chose Burbank as his initial West Coast destination “because that’s where Johnny Carson was from,” is loving every little bit of every California day, cancer-free, with his wife of 10 years, Julie, and their 6-yearold daughter Nessah, so named because “Nes” means miracle in Hebrew.
“Took four years to have her,” Silberstein said. “Lots of miracles in our lives.”
Once of them because Jordan chose to stop at a tent in 2018 and listen to those helping carry on Schwartz’s legacy.
With the Yale soccer season canceled due to the pandemic, Jordan took off the fall semester. Majoring in history of science, medicine and public health, she is interning at a CEO advisory firm in New York. She will re-enroll at Yale for the spring, with plans to play a final season of soccer before graduating in December 2021.
Discussions have begun about the Silbersteins visiting the Jordans on the Jersey Shore, and about the Jordans visiting the Silbersteins in Encino. The Silbersteins are likely to attend Jordan’s Yale graduation ceremony — and her wedding, whenever and wherever that might take place.
The point is they’ve been in this together from afar, before they even knew it, and they remain in this together from here, bonded not only by millions of stem cells that made their way across the country but so much more.
“I was thinking, what if she doesn’t want to meet?” Silberstein said. “Thank God, I was wrong.”