Austin, Minnesota Girl Gets Bone Marrow from Little Brother
In Austin, Minnesota, there's a 9-year-old girl named Adelia...and she needed a bone marrow transplant to fight off bone-marrow cancer. It's especially important to nip that kind of cancer because it can turn into leukemia super fast.
Anyway, she needed the bone-marrow transplant, and her little brother, Caleb, stepped up and said, "I'll do it." He's a second grader at Southgate Elementary and hey may not fully understand the gift his sister gets from him (it's tough for donor recipients to put it into words), but know you did really good, Caleb.
According to Mayo Clinic's Dr. Ernesto Ayala (a Mayo Clinic hematologist/oncologist with the Bone Marrow Transplant Program), "Close to 5,000 people in the U.S. undergo a bone marrow transplant annually. Also known as a stem cell transplant, this procedure replaces damaged or diseased bone marrow with healthy cells." But there's need for more donors.
Again, from Mayo Clinic,
"The biggest challenge we have in finding donors for patients needing bone marrow transplantation is ethnicity...if the patient belongs to an ethnic minority, let's say, African American or Hispanic or Middle Eastern, then the chance of finding a donor in the registry drastically drops to less than 25%, meaning many of these patients may never receive a transplant."
You can be a hero, just like Caleb...register to become a bone marrow donor. Click here to connect to giftoflife.org
Transplant of bone marrow, organs, skin, eyes...all of it is 100% amazing and an incredible blessing. If you don't need that sort of medical help, you know how fortunate you are. However, maybe there's some body quirks you wouldn't mind figuring out. Well scroll on...slowly.