ABOUT THE COLUMNIST
Gracie Bonds Staples is an award-winning journalist who has been writing for daily newspapers since 1979, when she graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi. She joined The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2000 after stints at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Sacramento Bee, Raleigh Times and two Mississippi dailies. Staples was recently promoted to Senior Features Enterprise Writer. Look for her columns Thursdays and Saturdays in Living and alternating Sundays in Metro.
Don’t show up and the recipient will die.
That last word hit Sarah Langville hard. For as long as she could remember, she’d watched her father donate life-saving blood at the local Red Cross office.
She admired him so much, the moment she was 16 and weighed the requisite 110 pounds, she too, began donating regularly.
But even then it was about those big T-shirts her dad passed on to her and her brother.
“They were huge, but in the ’80s that was cool,” Langville said of the shirts.
The memory brings a smile to her face before she turns again to the bigger story, the one that brought me to her home in Roswell: How she came to save the life of a stranger.
After graduating from Georgia Tech in 2004, Langville headed to Milwaukee, Wis., to work for General Electric.
She was reading the company's newsletter when she saw an item about Be The Match, the non-profit that recruits and matches volunteer marrow donors with patients, suffering from blood cancers, get life-saving transplants.
The agency was running a donor registry drive at one of the local hospitals. Langville decided to stop in to see if she might help in some way.
The hospital complex was so huge it was disorienting. It was raining and brutally cold. Langville was about to give up when she finally saw a sign that pointed her in the right direction.
There she filled out the paper work. A volunteer appeared to swab her cheek.
If you’re ever a match, we’ll give you a call, she was told.
Less than two months later, the call came. Langville's marrow matched a 3-year-old battling leukemia.
After additional screenings in November 2006, a time was set for the transplant.
As she signed the final paper work, this line popped off the page: Don’t show up and the recipient will die.
Donating marrow and blood is a kind thing to do. It is even a commendable thing to do.
But there is no law that requires any of us to volunteer our own body to save another’s life. And we’re certainly not obliged to undergo an invasive procedure that has risk, however small.
It never occurred to Langville to back out, but it happens. A simple Google search turned up one case in 1978 in which a Pittsburg man, David Shimp, agreed to donate bone marrow to his terminally ill cousin, Robert McFall, but backed out. McFall took his cousin to Allegheny County Court to compel him to donate, but lost. McFall died.
“Honestly, until then I thought of it more like donating blood,” Langville said. “I hadn’t met (the recipient). I didn’t know their name. I was in my 20s. I didn’t have kids.”
On a cold December morning in 2006, Langville checked into the hospital at 8 a.m as scheduled.
Within minutes she was wheeled to an operating room. Under anesthesia, the doctor inserted needles into the back of Langville’s pelvic bone and withdrew the marrow.
She was home by noon.
“I felt like I’d run a marathon, but it was nothing compared to the recipient and what he was dealing with,” she said. “It made me aware of how much we take our health for granted.”
In the few minutes it takes someone to swab their cheek and join the registry of volunteer marrow donors, another patient will learn he or she has leukemia, lymphoma or some other life-threatening blood disease, said Tiffany Friesen, major gifts officer at Be The Match Foundation. In the U.S., more than 14,000 patients are diagnosed each year.
For about 70 percent of all patients, no marrow match exists within their own families. They depend on the Be The Match Registry to find a matching donor.
The need for donors is especially urgent among ethnic minorities, who have a harder time finding transplant matches because of their genetic diversity. Among all types of donors, those between the ages of 18 and 44 provide the greatest chance for transplant success.
A year after her donation, Langville got a card from Be The Match asking if she’d be interested in communicating with her recipient. She said yes.
Soon thereafter she received a letter thanking her and again a couple years later a drawing from the little boy. He was in the third grade. His teacher had asked the class to draw a picture of their hero.
For him that was easy. Sarah Langville was his hero.
Langville doesn’t quite know what to make of that. Hero?
“It felt undeserved,” she said. “Looking back, I didn’t feel heroic, like I jumped off a cliff to save his life. It was literally a God moment. For at least one point in my life, I was in the right place at the right time.”
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