About a year ago, University student Kevin Summerfield found out a friend’s 15-year-old son was dying of leukemia and needed a bone marrow transplant to survive. But it was too late for Summerfield to help. The boy died a week later.
Despite a life and death search, the family found no one who fit the strict criteria for donation.
Summerfield now remembers thinking, “Hey, I could have been the match,” but he wasn’t registered in the national database of marrow donors.
When Summerfield’s 10-year-old son Kean came home from school talking about a teacher’s daughter who needed a marrow transplant, Summerfield had to act.
He’s now working as part of a campaign to strengthen a national registry of more than six million marrow donors. To register, people can visit www.marrow.org and receive a donation package in the mail. After a quick swab of the inner cheek to test the tissue-type, the package is mailed in and that person has the chance to save someone’s life.
The donor and the recipient need similar DNA, said Delores Rue-Jones of the National Marrow Donor Program. Because only about 30 percent of people find someone with matching tissue in their immediate family, most people need outside sources. Registry is normally $52 for European Americans, but it’s free through Monday. It’s always free for people of color, because a matching marrow almost always comes from a person from the same ethnic group. People of color are underrepresented in the registry, making the need for their help especially great.
When Summerfield registered at a marrow drive, he asked the coordinator how many African Americans had registered that day. The answer was one – him.
The demand is high for marrow from all ethnicities, Rue-Jones said, but is highest in the order of Native Americans, African Americans, Asians, Pacific Islanders, Latinos and Caucasians.
To receive marrow, patients need to undergo rigorous regimens of chemotherapy and radiation therapy so their bodies won’t reject the marrow, which could kill them. More than 70 percent of marrow recipients live for more than five years after the procedure, but some don’t make it.
“Most often patients don’t survive from complications from the preparation,” Rue-Jones said.
Although registering is easy, donating the soft, red-blood-cell-producing tissue encased in the bones is no simple procedure. During a surgical procedure, doctors put patients to sleep and pierce the back of their pelvic bones using hollow needles, which then suck out the liquid marrow. The procedure requires a few days of rest and comes with the same risks as any surgery, including fatigue, pain and nausea, with rare cases of serious complications.
At an on-campus drive Tuesday – which registered 183 people – Summerfield spoke of the University’s unique connection to the problem of finding donors.
University President Dave Frohnmayer is a founding director of the National Marrow Donor Program, which is sponsoring the nationwide two-week-long marrow drive of which Summerfield’s efforts are a part.
In 1990, Frohnmayer was simultaneously running for governor of Oregon and racing around the continent searching for potential marrow donors for his daughter Katie, who was dying of a rare genetic disorder, Fanconi anemia. In 1991, after he lost the election, Katie passed away. She was 12.
In 1997, his daughter Kirsten, who had Fanconi anemia as well, passed after complications arose from a marrow transplant.
Their daughter Amy has the disorder and is currently a healthy student at Stanford University.
Bone marrow donations are particularly risky for people suffering from Fanconi anemia, an Oregon Health and Science University press release states, but it regularly saves the lives of people with a variety of cancers, anemias and congenital disorders.
The University is an ideal place to raise awareness about the need for marrow, not only because of the president’s connection to the need for marrow, Summerfield said, but because every year there is a huge influx of potential donors – namely, freshmen.
Freshman Helen Kidane is scared of needles. She registered to donate.
“At first I was afraid,” Kidane said. “Then I realized I could help save someone’s life.”
“The pain is going to be temporary,” she said.
Kidane heard about the marrow drive through the Black Student Union and the student group Black Women of Achievement.
Summerfield, a senior majoring in family and human services, worked with student unions, Greek houses and the Office of the President to organize the on-campus drives.
“This is about saving lives,” Summerfield said. “I didn’t do it as a school project, I did it out of my heart.”
“It’s helping the community help itself,” he said.
The marrow drive isn’t Summerfield’s only outlet for giving back to the community. He works three days a week with at-risk kids and two days a week to finish up his degree in family and human services. He’s also a single parent, so much of his remaining time is spent raising his young son. In two years, when his son gets to middle school, Summerfield said he’s planning to apply to the University’s master’s program in marriage and family therapy.
Summerfield thinks a lot about the future. Next year he plans to have the University’s marrow drive compete in numbers with Oregon State University. The next year, he wants all the colleges and universities in Oregon to compete with other states. Currently the registry spans the entire nation, but, Summerfield said, he wants to see it go global so strangers everywhere can save each others’ lives.
“It’s the ultimate random act of kindness,” Summerfield said.
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