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Life's a Payback for Marrow Donor
For CWA Local 7026 member Andy Benavidez, it was important to try to save a life and repay the kindness of strangers. And all the more so because he is Hispanic. Only 20 percent of marrow and blood stem cell donors registered with the National Marrow Donor Program are minorities.
Twenty-six years ago Benavidez' daughter Sonja was born two months premature, weighing just 3 pounds 8 ounces. Blood transfusions from anonymous donors kept her alive during 36 days in intensive care at the Tucson Medical Center.
So in November 2000 when he heard about Local 7026's education and recruitment drive sponsored by Tucson's American Red Cross, a donor center of the National Marrow Donor Program, he enlisted as a potential donor, hoping in this different way to extend the life of another.
The NMDP is committed to a global mission to extend and improve life through innovative stem cell therapies. Through its extensive U.S. and international network, the program maintains the world's largest, most diverse registry of nearly 5 million volunteer blood stem donors and more than 25,000 cord blood units. It provides resources for patients and physicians and conducts research to improve the outcomes of stem cell transplantation. The NMDP offers searching patients who do not have suitable family donors a single point of access for all three types of blood stem cells used in transplantation: marrow, peripheral blood stem cells and umbilical cord blood.
On March 17, doctors extracted marrow from Benavidez' bones, transplanting it the following day into a 3-year-old boy from another country.
It's the boy's final chance at life - he is afflicted with the potentially fatal disease, chronic myelogenous leukemia. He doesn't know who Andy is, and Benavidez doesn't know his name. And doctors won't know for at least a month whether the transplant worked.
Community of Care
The local's effort to educate and recruit members to be potential volunteer donors originated with Kathy Bauer, community services chair, who contacted the donor center to help register local residents. With Sandi Nye, center coordinator, and Cecilia Valdez, Local 7026 secretary-treasurer, she set up drives at three then-U.S. West locations - two in Tucson and one in Nogales, Ariz.
The local paid about $250 for blood tests for Caucasian donors. Federal funding subsidizes the testing for minorities because there is a shortage. Of about 5 million registered donors, only about 1 million are minorities.
Stem cell transplants require matching certain tissue traits of the donor and patient. Some traits are unique to people of specific ancestry. Because these traits are inherited, a patient's most likely match is someone from the same racial or ethnic group.
African-American, Asian, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, Hispanic and American Indian/Alaska Native patients face a greater challenge in finding matched donors than Caucasian patients.
Since 1992, the national program has been working to increase its outreach and recruitment of more diverse donors for the NMDP registry. The likelihood of finding a match for ethnic minority patients has increased dramatically, but the program continues to explore ways to improve the chances of finding a match for all patients.
About 150 members are enrolled in the local's program. "For us, it was a way of promoting CWA in the community and letting people know that we care," Bauer said.
On any given day, 3,000 patients are searching the NMDP registry for a suitable donor to donate healthy stem cells for their life-saving transplant to treat such diseases as leukemia, several cancers, lymphoma and certain congenital defects.
"About 25 percent of these are children," Nye said. "These people's only chance - not guaranteed, but chance of life - is a suitable donor."
Thirty percent of people who need a donor will find a compatible sibling, but 70 percent have to look for an unrelated match. The NMDP, by computer, tracks donors in Tucson, at centers throughout the United States and around the world.
Ongoing National Program
CWA has encouraged participation in the National Marrow Donor Program since 1994, when Local 1103 Chief Steward Phyllis Cole-Hollis launched her own search for a marrow donor.
Since that time, thousands of CWA members have joined the program's registry in an effort to save lives. The union has made an ongoing commitment to helping its members and their families who are faced with the challenges of undergoing a marrow transplant.
More than 60 locals, sectors and districts have contributed to the CWA Patient Assistance Fund to defray the cost of a bone marrow or stem cell search for anyone in a CWA member's family.
The union established its fund with the Marrow Foundation, a partner of the NMDP. The foundation secures resources from the private sector to support the work of the program.
Discomfort Dispelled by Hope
With Benavidez under general anesthesia, doctors withdrew marrow from his pelvic bones, through the back of his hip. He took a couple of days off work to recover and said he had only mild pain, "like you might have if you had fallen and had a bone bruise."
He and wife Patty are busy these days helping their daughter, now a bank manager in Tucson, prepare for her wedding. He thinks often about his donation.
Because of the program's policy of confidentiality, he cannot learn the child's identity nor meet him for at least a year. "I hope this boy gets a second chance at life and can lead a productive life as my daughter has," he said.
To learn more about registering as a marrow or blood stem cell donor, call the National Marrow Donor Program at (800) MARROW-2 or visit www.marrow.org. Information about The Marrow Foundation is available at www.themarrowfoundation.org. For help in locating a marrow match for a CWA member or relative, or for your local to become a sponsor of the CWA Patient Assistance Fund, call Janine Brown, CWA representative for community services, at (202) 434-1149.
Twenty-six years ago Benavidez' daughter Sonja was born two months premature, weighing just 3 pounds 8 ounces. Blood transfusions from anonymous donors kept her alive during 36 days in intensive care at the Tucson Medical Center.
So in November 2000 when he heard about Local 7026's education and recruitment drive sponsored by Tucson's American Red Cross, a donor center of the National Marrow Donor Program, he enlisted as a potential donor, hoping in this different way to extend the life of another.
The NMDP is committed to a global mission to extend and improve life through innovative stem cell therapies. Through its extensive U.S. and international network, the program maintains the world's largest, most diverse registry of nearly 5 million volunteer blood stem donors and more than 25,000 cord blood units. It provides resources for patients and physicians and conducts research to improve the outcomes of stem cell transplantation. The NMDP offers searching patients who do not have suitable family donors a single point of access for all three types of blood stem cells used in transplantation: marrow, peripheral blood stem cells and umbilical cord blood.
On March 17, doctors extracted marrow from Benavidez' bones, transplanting it the following day into a 3-year-old boy from another country.
It's the boy's final chance at life - he is afflicted with the potentially fatal disease, chronic myelogenous leukemia. He doesn't know who Andy is, and Benavidez doesn't know his name. And doctors won't know for at least a month whether the transplant worked.
Community of Care
The local's effort to educate and recruit members to be potential volunteer donors originated with Kathy Bauer, community services chair, who contacted the donor center to help register local residents. With Sandi Nye, center coordinator, and Cecilia Valdez, Local 7026 secretary-treasurer, she set up drives at three then-U.S. West locations - two in Tucson and one in Nogales, Ariz.
The local paid about $250 for blood tests for Caucasian donors. Federal funding subsidizes the testing for minorities because there is a shortage. Of about 5 million registered donors, only about 1 million are minorities.
Stem cell transplants require matching certain tissue traits of the donor and patient. Some traits are unique to people of specific ancestry. Because these traits are inherited, a patient's most likely match is someone from the same racial or ethnic group.
African-American, Asian, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, Hispanic and American Indian/Alaska Native patients face a greater challenge in finding matched donors than Caucasian patients.
Since 1992, the national program has been working to increase its outreach and recruitment of more diverse donors for the NMDP registry. The likelihood of finding a match for ethnic minority patients has increased dramatically, but the program continues to explore ways to improve the chances of finding a match for all patients.
About 150 members are enrolled in the local's program. "For us, it was a way of promoting CWA in the community and letting people know that we care," Bauer said.
On any given day, 3,000 patients are searching the NMDP registry for a suitable donor to donate healthy stem cells for their life-saving transplant to treat such diseases as leukemia, several cancers, lymphoma and certain congenital defects.
"About 25 percent of these are children," Nye said. "These people's only chance - not guaranteed, but chance of life - is a suitable donor."
Thirty percent of people who need a donor will find a compatible sibling, but 70 percent have to look for an unrelated match. The NMDP, by computer, tracks donors in Tucson, at centers throughout the United States and around the world.
Ongoing National Program
CWA has encouraged participation in the National Marrow Donor Program since 1994, when Local 1103 Chief Steward Phyllis Cole-Hollis launched her own search for a marrow donor.
Since that time, thousands of CWA members have joined the program's registry in an effort to save lives. The union has made an ongoing commitment to helping its members and their families who are faced with the challenges of undergoing a marrow transplant.
More than 60 locals, sectors and districts have contributed to the CWA Patient Assistance Fund to defray the cost of a bone marrow or stem cell search for anyone in a CWA member's family.
The union established its fund with the Marrow Foundation, a partner of the NMDP. The foundation secures resources from the private sector to support the work of the program.
Discomfort Dispelled by Hope
With Benavidez under general anesthesia, doctors withdrew marrow from his pelvic bones, through the back of his hip. He took a couple of days off work to recover and said he had only mild pain, "like you might have if you had fallen and had a bone bruise."
He and wife Patty are busy these days helping their daughter, now a bank manager in Tucson, prepare for her wedding. He thinks often about his donation.
Because of the program's policy of confidentiality, he cannot learn the child's identity nor meet him for at least a year. "I hope this boy gets a second chance at life and can lead a productive life as my daughter has," he said.
To learn more about registering as a marrow or blood stem cell donor, call the National Marrow Donor Program at (800) MARROW-2 or visit www.marrow.org. Information about The Marrow Foundation is available at www.themarrowfoundation.org. For help in locating a marrow match for a CWA member or relative, or for your local to become a sponsor of the CWA Patient Assistance Fund, call Janine Brown, CWA representative for community services, at (202) 434-1149.