Help Found For Boy Who Has Leukemia
A bone-marrow donor has been found for a Pasco boy who needs a transplant this autumn to save his life.
Emilio Carrillo, 12, has leukemia.
None of Emilio’s family has compatible tissue, so Emilio and his doctors had to look to strangers - and even longer odds of finding a donor.
Last month, 90 people showed up at La Clinica willing to undergo testing to see if they might be a match for Emilio.
The screening was held in Pasco in hopes of listing more Hispanics in the national registry because Hispanics offered Emilio his best hope for a match.
“I thought I would get a match in Pasco when I saw those people,” Emilio said in a Friday interview from the Ronald McDonald House in Seattle.
At the same time Emilio’s friends and neighbors were offering blood samples in Pasco, specialists at the National Bone Registry plowed through 1.7 million names already on the list.
Since then, searchers have found 26 potential matches and, out of those, one that seemed to offer the best promise of life, said Dr. Elden Lopez, a pediatrician at La Clinica, a low-income medical clinic.
One of the potential matches came from the Tri-Cities, said Laura Oiland, marrow program supervisor for the Inland Northwest Blood Center, which conducted the screening.
She said she didn’t know where the potential donor lives, adding that names are traditionally kept confidential.
And how did Emilio feel after he learned of the match?
“OK,” he said with a 12-year-old boy’s understatement.
Emilio and most of his family went to Seattle on Friday to prepare for the transplant. His father, Tito, had to stay in the mid-Columbia Basin to work in the fields.
“He’s picking potatoes, and it’s a busy time for him,” Emilio said.
Emilio will undergo chemotherapy and then whole-body radiation to kill his bone marrow before the transplant, which should take place in six to eight weeks.
A small amount of marrow fluid will be sucked from the donor and flown to Seattle, where it will be injected into Emilio.
“He will die without it,” Lopez said.