‘Sister gave me bone marrow to help serious blood condition’

A RETIRED professor is raising awareness about blood and marrow donation after he was kindly donated marrow by his eldest sister.

Nick Topley, 59, a former senior lecturer and medical expert at Cardiff University’s School of Medicine, underwent a bone marrow transplant to treat Aplastic Anaemia, a serious condition affecting the blood, during Christmas 2012 at the University Hospital of Wales.

He says he was initially diagnosed in 2004 but a few years later in 2009, he noticed himself struggling to walk up the stairs to the car park at work despite being fit.

He said: “I noticed I couldn’t walk to the car park in the hospital.

“With these sorts of things, you try and pretend that it isn’t there but then we went on a family holiday to Greece and I knew then it was serious and something needed to be done.

“I have two brothers and two sisters and so I asked them to get tested to see if they were possible matches and luckily for me both my sisters were.”

Nick’s older sister Freya, 67, agreed to become a donor and just after Boxing Day, the pair spent the night at the hospital, a few beds apart from each other.

Nick said: “I asked my sister loads of times if she was happy to go through with it and she constantly told me she was.

“She told me that anyone should be doing this let alone family and that made me really happy.

“Even though she was my sister, I felt a lot of gratitude towards her.

“She was fantastic and I was so proud of her bravery.”

He returned to work after around six months of recovery at his home in Barry.

He believes the road to recovery can be tough and it can take months for anyone to recover from the condition,