Toddler saved by perfect match
As a University of New Haven freshman, Rachel Buck signed up for a bone marrow drive. Three years later, she found her match: a 14-month-old boy in dire need.
“It’s hard to put into words, but I just feel connected to them. We blended so well. I just got a bunch of new little brothers.”
— Rachel Buck
It was Rachel Buck’s freshman year and she was late to calculus class at the University of New Haven. Some of the New Haven football players who were her friends were urging her to sign up for their Be The Match bone marrow drive. So she did. Buck, a UNH cheerleader from Berlin, got the bone marrow donor card a few weeks later and put it in her car and forgot about it.
Her phone rang in May of her senior year, 2019. She was at the Mohegan Sun for Senior Week activities. She was a potential match.
Meanwhile, in Indiana, Jacob Parry had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. He was a year old.
“The doctors hinted it was going to be a very aggressive cancer to treat,” his mother Kaylie Parry said. “Pretty quickly we knew he was going to need a stem cell transplant to give him the best chance of life in remission, or life at all, really.
“In late May 2019, they found a donor.” Buck, who was 21 at the time, was a perfect match, 10 out of 10. She said yes. How could she not?
Jacob is now 3 years old. He and his family met Buck and her family for the first time Aug. 13 before a Worcester Bravehearts baseball game. The son of the team owner needs a bone marrow transplant; the team has supported a Be the Match initiative throughout the season, and it was arranged for the families to meet at the game and spend the
weekend together.
“There’s no adjective that’s adequate to describe how we felt,” Kaylie said of the meeting. “I feel like we just gained a family member. She said yes, and we just thank God every day she said yes to Be the Match. She is part of the team that helped save Jacob’s life.”
Buck had a hard time expressing how she felt about meeting the family she didn’t know but to whom she felt so connected.
“I was shaking the whole time,” said Buck, now 23 and living in Medford, Mass. “I was so nervous. I was crying like a baby.
“It’s hard to put into words, but I just feel connected to them. We blended so well. I just got a bunch of new little brothers.”
In his first year of life, Jacob was in the hospital 287 out of 365 days. He spent 194 straight days in the hospital before and after the transplant, which took place in September 2019.
All Buck knew was that he was a 14-month-old boy. She didn’t know that he had had treatment but had relapsed that July. At one point, his kidneys and liver shut down, and he was on a ventilator.
She just wanted to help. “I don’t think I realized the intensity of what it was,” she said. “There were certain moments throughout the process where it got a little more real for me. I didn’t realize the weight of it.”
It was her first surgery. She was in the hospital for about 12 hours.
“They took bone
marrow straight from my pelvis, and they airlifted it to him when they were done,” Buck said. “The whole procedure took maybe an hour and a half. I was back to work in less than a week.”
In Indiana, Jacob was looking out of his hospital window when he saw an airplane. His mom took a picture. Was it the plane with Buck’s bone marrow? Maybe not, but Kaylie knows it’s a good story.
“It was an amazing feeling,” Kaylie said. “This whole process, there’s no adequate words to describe our thankfulness, our appreciation for what she did for us.”
One thing Jacob couldn’t do before was play in the dirt, because he was immuno-compromised.
“Every time he’s in the dirt, we’re like, ‘Thanks Rachel. He can play in the dirt now,’ ” Kaylie said. “Just little things like that
you take for granted.”
Buck, who majored in forensic science and pre-med biology at New Haven, is now working as a medical technician in the microbiology lab at Tufts Medical Center.
“I was thinking about it: I was on the registry before he was even born,” she said. “So I was just waiting in the wings.”