Family ties
“He truly did save my life,” Betsy Lucas says of the man who donated marrow to her more than three years ago. “And he gave my children their mother back.” Betsy recently had the chance to thank her donor face to face when he flew from Germany to Minneapolis to meet her.
When Betsy was diagnosed with leukemia, she was 34 years old with a husband and two daughters, a 10-month-old and a three-year-old.
“To continue to be a mother to my children -- that was the critical thing to me,” Betsy said. “That really became apparent as I was going through the transplant.”
It began with a simple rash
Betsy’s journey to transplant began one Thursday morning when she noticed a rash on her shin. It didn’t look particularly alarming at first, but the rash kept spreading, so she went to the doctor the next day. At the doctor’s office, they drew some blood for tests and sent her home with a medication for the rash.
But it got worse over the weekend. On Monday, she went back to the doctor,
and another blood sample was drawn for testing. It showed that her white blood
cell count had risen dramatically over the weekend. Betsy’s doctor told her she
had leukemia.
She went immediately to an oncologist, who diagnosed her
with chronic myelogenous leukemia in the most advanced stage. She was told she
would need a bone marrow transplant.
Looking for a donor
A transplant requires a close genetic match, so doctors always look first in
a patient’s family. Each sibling has a 25% chance of being a match. But when
Betsy’s sister was tested, she was not a match.
Betsy’s doctors turned
to the National Marrow Donor Program to search its Be The Match
RegistrySM and began a global search for a
suitable donor. When they found one, he turned out to be a 19-year-old man from
Germany, but Betsy didn't learn the details until much later. At the time of her
transplant, she knew only that a stranger had agreed to donate his cells to her.
“I’m alive and well today because I had a transplant,” she says. “I
would hope that my donor knows that he’s given me life, and that’s the most
generous gift anyone could give me.”