I'm a match!

About a year ago, I signed up for the Be the Match Registry. I'm lucky to count a few cousins among my best friends, and one of those cousins has battled sickle cell anemia his whole life. I figured that I would be proactive and sign up now, so that I'd be established in the system as a potential match the next time he had a big health scare.

Luckily, he's spent the last year in fantastic health. So imagine my surprise when the week before Christmas, I got a phone call and an email asking me to contact the registry immediately. Be the Match had identified me as a potential match for a newborn baby boy fighting HLH (hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis), a rare immunodeficiency that almost exclusively affects infants and young children.

"Are you still interested in being a bone marrow donor?" they asked.

"What the hell kind of person says no when they find out they might be a match?" I replied.

So the day after Christmas, I slogged up the highway in slushy, snowy rain to have blood drawn, the next step in ascertaining if I might be an actual match for this little guy. I cracked jokes with the phlebotomist about that time I punched a nurse in the face for trying to stick an IV needle in my arm without warning; she confided that she feels the same way at the dentist's office. For the whole drive home, I prayed that I would be the willing match this baby boy needed. When I got home, I promptly forgot, as life went on.

On Wednesday, Nick and I went on a grueling hike of eight miles of the Appalachian Trail. We camped overnight on top of a mountain; after I survived through the night, cold and sleepless but very much alive, I felt unstoppable as I marched back down the mountain. I got home to celebrate my sister's 24th birthday with sushi. I climbed into my bed after dinner for a sleep so deep that I didn't even notice when my phone rang this morning.

When I woke up, I listened to the voicemail from Susan from Be the Match. As I called back I knew. Susan confirmed it. I am the match for the newborn baby boy. My bone marrow is the cure that he and his family need. I enthusiastically told Susan that yes, I was still interested.

"First, we need to make you aware of what the procedure entails," she began.
"Do you mean how painful it is?"
"Well," she waffled.
"It can't hurt worse than having your baby die because a donor match said no," I shot into the void she left empty.
"OK. I'll put your information packet in the mail overnight then, so we can get your consent form signed ASAP," she responded.

I've spent the last several hours overwhelmed by what is coming next. I am so humbled - so God damn blown away - that out of the billions of people in this world, I am the match for a tiny baby boy, a child his parents have hung all their love and hope and dreams upon. I'm in shock that after wanting nothing more for my whole short life than to make other people's lives better, I have the opportunity to literally save a life. I am going to save a child's life. Not figuratively or metaphorically. Not as a teacher. I am going to keep a kid from dying. I'm just as blown away by the fact that for a pretty adamantly child-free person, I have this overwhelming desire to hold this little boy in my arms and look at him for hours, because we'll be linked to one another in a way that no one else in the world will ever be.

I'm clearly still processing this. But I'm so... moved by the opportunity to do this for another person that I just don't know what to do with myself.