Blood Ties Girl Meets Bone-Marrow Donor Who Helped Save Her Life
A 6-year-old from Maryland and the bone-marrow donor who helped save her life are getting acquainted.
Valerie Hamlett “has my blood type now. She has XY chromosomes. The blood running through her is mine and that’s strange to me,” marveled donor Bruce Upchurch, a staff biologist at Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium.
“In a way, it’s like magic to me,” said Upchurch, who led Valerie and her family on a tour of the zoo Tuesday.
“I knew I helped just giving her a chance and that was enough,” said Upchurch, 38, of Kent.
“This puts a cap on it.”
Upchurch and the family had exchanged letters, but the Hamletts wanted to meet in person.
“I wanted to give Valerie an opportunity to meet him,” Mrs. Hamlett said. “She knows very little about it. She knows he gave blood, and she thanked him yesterday.”
Valerie was diagnosed with leukemia at age 2. Chemotherapy failed twice, and doctors told her parents that Valerie would not survive without a transplant.
Her parents, Michele and Tim Hamlett, weren’t perfect matches and her siblings, Christopher, 2, and Julia, 7 months, hadn’t been born.
But Upchurch was a perfect match.
“It’s like our prayers were answered,” Hamlett said. “When we sent away for information, things looked pretty bleak.”
Valerie underwent a transplant of his marrow nearly three years ago.
“Even with the transplant, things were pretty bleak because of the risks involved. But it’s been three years and everything looks great,” he said.
The Hamletts’ trip to Washington state was sponsored by the Grant-a-Wish Foundation, a national organization that fulfills the wishes of critically ill children.
“It’s a pretty special feeling when you first donate the marrow,” Upchurch said. “You don’t really know where it’s going or who gets it.”
He joined the National Marrow Donor Registry through the Puget Sound Blood Center in 1990 at the suggestion of a close friend diagnosed with leukemia. The friend later died from complications of an aneurysm.
Upchurch had his tissue typed and that information was logged into the national registry, a computerized database of potential marrow donors. Patients and donors must have matching tissue types and matches are highly dependent upon such factors as race.
“There’s a very good chance you’ll never be called to be a marrow donor when you’re on the registry,” said Keith Warnack, a spokesman for the Puget Sound Blood Program.
“But the more donors you’ve got, the more chances you have to get potential matches.”
About 27,000 healthy blood donors in Western Washington have joined the program since it began in 1986, and 300 have donated bone marrow.
Last August, Upchurch became a second-time bone-marrow donor.
That recipient, an adult man, later died.