Features
Wednesday, September 25, 2013 • page 20
‘A second chance at life’
Elon senior donates blood stem cells to cancer patient
Kyra Gemberling
Features Editor
Elon University senior James Davies may
have just accomplished the top goal on his
bucket list: to save someone’s life.
But it didn’t happen quite the way he ex
pected. He didn’t dramatically rescue some
one from a burning building, nor did he save
someone from drowning. Instead, Davies
made a blood stem cell donation to a leuke
mia patient in need in early September.
The process for the donation all started
when Davies attended an on-campus bone
marrow donor drive set up by Elon’s Nation
al Pan-Hellenic Council his sophomore year.
“A friend of mine told me to come sign
up with her at a bone marrow registry for
the Delete Blood Cancer DKMS center,”
Davies said. “I had no idea what any of that
meant. My friend said the odds of me get
ting picked [to donate] were less than the
odds of me winning the lottery, so I was like,
‘OK, I’ll feel like a good person and sign up.
I’ll probably never get called anyway.’”
But Davies’ chance of being selected was
higher than he thought. He received an im
portant call from a representative at DKMS
about a year after he signed up.
“I was actually driving to my girlfriend’s
house when I got a call from a guy saying,
‘You’re a match with one of our patients and
we’d love for you to donate,”’he said.
Davies agreed and began moving forward
with the donor procedure. He was soon told
he would be doing a peripheral blood stem
cell (PBSC) donation, an outpatient proce
dure that serves as the more common and
less painful method of the two ways bone
marrow can be donated. The other method
is a surgical donation where bone marrow is
removed from the back of both hipbones.
“My procedure was way less intense,” Da
vies said.
But Davies had to go through several cru
cial steps before undergoing the procedure
itself First, he had to get a physical to make
sure his heart, liver, spleen and lungs were
all healthy enough to handle the procedure.
Second, he had to be injected with fil
grastim — a synthetic protein used to boost
stem cell and platelet count — on the four
consecutive days leading up to the donation.
When the time finally came, Davies trav
eled to Washington, D.C., for the procedure.
Blood was taken through one arm and
then passed through a machine that sepa
rated out the blood stem cells to be provided
to the patient in need. The remaining blood
was returned to Davies’ body through the
other arm. The procedure took about four to
five hours total.
“The nurse was saying they filtered all the
blood in my body somewhere between two
to four times, but honestly, I didn’t even feel
anything,” Davies said. “I wasn’t even sore
the next day — just a little tired. [Two days
later] I felt 100 percent fine.”
Every day thousands of patients search
for a bone marrow donor match, but only
four out of 10 patients will receive a trans
plant because of the current lack of match
ing donors, according to Rebecca Dow,
workup coordinator for Delete Blood
Cancer DKMS. She said DKMS works to
spread greater awareness about the need for
more registered donors — the more people
they reach, the more patients can potentially
be saved, she said.
“The mission of Delete Blood Cancer
DKMS is to eradicate blood cancer and
register more people to become a potential
lifesaver,” Dow said. “James is an example
of a modern-day hero for selflessly giving a
second chance at life for someone in need.”
But what makes Davies’ situation even
more unique is, because of DKMS’s patient
confidentiality rule, he barely knows any
thing about the person to whom he donated.
The patient can choose to reach out to Da
vies a year after the procedure takes place,
though, and Davies said he hopes that will
happen.
“All I know is that he’s a 5S-year-old
male with leukemia who lives in the United
States,” he said. “I don’t know his name or
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PHOTO SUBMII TED BY JAMES DAVIES
Elon University senior James Davies donated blood stem cells to a leukemia patient in need in early September.
He did a peripheral blood stem cell (PBSC) donation, an outpatient procedure that lasts about five hours.
anything about this guy, but if I can give him
a second chance at life — maybe a chance
for him to walk his daughter down the aisle
or see his grandchildren — I think that’s a
pretty remarkable thing, and it would be a
crazy rewarding experience to meet him
someday.”
In the meantime, Davies said he’s deter
mined to set up more bone marrow donor
drives at Elon, whether it’s on his own or
through the Student Union Board, of which
he is president. A college student is 75 per
cent more likely to sign up to donate than
the average person, according to Dow, so
Davies said he hopes to take advantage of
this statistic at Elon.
“It would be really good for Elon stu
dents to do this,” he said. “We always talk
about building the local community, but you
have to contribute to the global community
as well. I will personally try to do something
more for this cause in anyway I can.”