Marrow

I went to a small high school.  My graduating class had about 80 if I remember right.  We knew each other as small children.  Many of us know each other now.

Michele D was one of our sweet classmates. Michele is just a genuinely nice person with a positive outlook without getting all Pollyanna about it.  Two years ago she got physically tired beyond what was reasonable for a mother of two young children.  She had leukemia.  We watched her fight and cheered her through chemotherapy and radiation.  She needed a stem cell transplant and her brother was a miraculous match.  Something like 70 percent of recipients don't have a family match and must receive from a donor.  Michele got better and better.

And then she had a really bad earache.  The leukemia was in her brain.

How can a blood disease become a brain disease?  I have no clue other than it's weird and unfair, but that's what happened.  She has not written on her Caringbridge site since January.  She wrote about how much she hated being sick and losing her hair and being in bed and the pressure it put on her family.

She wrote about how much she loves her family.

I have been registered as a potential donor on the National Marrow Donor Program list since 1996.  I was barely married.  I had no children.  It seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do.  I have never been contacted about being someone's match -- until this week.

So far I have been through a brief health history.  If "my" patient needs me, I will be contacted in the next eight weeks.  I am compulsively driven by the love I feel for my own family and my long friendship with Michele to do now what seemed so long ago as "perfectly reasonable."

While I wait to hear, I am praying for my dear patient -- that it will not come to this, that there will be unreasonable, miraculous healing.  I am praying that if she or he needs me, I will be ready and that it will go smoothly and there will be healing through this.

I am praying for Michele -- for perfection in every area of her life right now.