Transplant donors are generous individuals who give a part of their body to another human being. In many cases, their donation saves the life of the recipient or helps the recipient enjoy a much higher standard of living.
Most donors give anonymously and never get to meet the recipients of their organs or tissue. However, it’s common for recipients to have an interest in meeting their donor just to say thank you for such an incredible gift.
One recipient recently had a chance to meet her donor after a 20-year wait. The story begins in 1997, when a 24-year-old Chicago woman Holly Becker was told that she had Stage 4 non-Hodgkin Lymphoma. Doctors said that her prognosis was very poor and that her only chance of survival was to receive a stem cell transplant.
Unfortunately, there were no bone marrow matches available. Doctors at the Loyola University Medical Center decided to look at donated umbilical cord blood to see if a stem cell match could be found.
A short time later, they found a match from an anonymous donor. That donor was a newborn baby named Patrick Davey. Patrick’s mother, Dania Davey, had agreed to his umbilical cord blood being donated in an effort to save Holly’s life. After receiving the transplant, Holly quickly recovered and that was the end of the story for the time being.
20 years later, Holly and Dania managed to meet up again thanks to both women performing a DNA match on Ancestry.com. The DNA test had told them that they were related.
It was only after they met that they discovered that Holly had received a transplant from Patrick. Patrick was delighted that his cord blood had been used to save Holly and Holly was excited to finally thank her donor.
Source: 2 Lives Joined Together By DNA
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