Oh the Possibilities

Several weeks ago I had the opportunity to join the National Bone Marrow Registry, inspired by a drive we were hosting as the college group at our church. It was actually the inspiration for the "how far would you go to save a life" blog that I never followed up on. There's this little boy in the area who is not quite two yet and he has a blood disease called HLH. He needs a bone marrow transplant, and his family had worked at several drives, including ours. Anthony's grandparents were in charge of doing the swabbing, so it was really neat to get to talk to them and get to know them, his parents also stopped by for a few hours so it was neat to talk to them as well, they are really young, his dad is only 28. Anthony has already reached the cap on his medical insurance, which is $2 million, for life, can you imagine that before he's even two and before he's in remission from this disease he's already out of medical insurance, and the weight that has now fallen on his parents. Alright, I'm getting a little off topic here, so back to where I was going with this. At our drive 87 people joined the registry, how amazing is that!!

It takes about 6 weeks to get processed and into the data base, and after that your name is run through an average of 3000 times a day for people looking for matches. Our names are not in the registry yet, as it's only been 3 or 4 weeks, but we just heard the other night that they ran Anthony through the other day and found 3 possible matches for him!!! So the whole point of this blog is to ask that you keep this little guy in your prayers so that the doctors can find him the best possible match and that he recovers and goes on to lead a healthy life.