Living Out Loud by Craig Sager

Author:Craig Sager
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

15

A Match

My siblings and I were told that finding a donor to give Dad a bone marrow transplant was the only option for long-term remission. The online research I had been doing since his diagnosis prepared me for the possibility of a transplant. Hearing it for the first time, however, was something I wasn’t quite prepared for.

To me, bone marrow was that yellowish, spongy stuff in the middle of bones that I had no appetite for visualizing. Now it had become the only way to save my dad’s life. I could envision them extracting it out of his body. I could picture all the new cells that would have to fill his hollow bones to build an entire new immune system from scratch. My dad was going to have to go through this dangerous procedure, and I fully grasped how complicated, terrifying, and incredible this process was going to be.

After hearing that a transplant was the route we were taking, I soon became convinced that I was going to be the one to donate the bone marrow, even though the statistics weren’t in my favor. Finding a match is a long shot—there are six leukocyte antigen key markers that the tests compare between the donor and the recipient, and the doctors suggested that there was only a 25 percent chance that I would match on half. The odds of being the perfect donor they were searching for were even lower—only 2 percent of children share all six markers with a parent—but no matter how long it had been or what age I was at, spending father-son time always reminded me of just how much the two of us are alike. We had the same competitive drive, the same constant craving for excitement, and the same behaviors and mannerisms—even the same taste in clothes. Everything I felt inside myself when I was in my own world was in him, too, I believed, only amplified.

The donor testing process can be done with a swift cotton swab of the mouth to collect a DNA sample, but for family members, nurses go straight to blood tests to accelerate the steps. My biggest obstacle was getting over my fear of needles. As a kid, if I knew I had a doctor’s appointment in a month, that whole month was ruined. One of the happiest days of my childhood was when I talked a doctor out of giving me a finger prick.

When my sisters and I, along with my Aunt Candy, got tested at Northside Hospital on May 6, the second the blood started to come out, I felt myself getting ready to pass out—an uncontrollable response. My vision was the first to go, followed by the irritation and pain of pins and needles all over my body. I started to sway, and then boom! The next thing I know, I’m coming to with the help of the nurses. Somehow, before I passed out, they had collected enough blood in the vial.

On May 22, Dad called

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