“You must be able to respond to your circumstances
as they exist – not as you would like them to be.”
– Brian Billick
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WNST.net partner & Super Bowl XXXV
Head Coach Baltimore Ravens
THE BONE MARROW TRANSPLANT NURSE said the blood – or more accurately the “lymphocytes” – would arrive at 2 p.m. At exactly 2:07 on Thursday, Nov. 19th, she walked in the room with another plastic bag filled with the red river of life. This was a much smaller bag than anything I’d ever seen attached to my wife’s tree of connected devices, medicines and fluids.
“We’re only giving her the stuff she needs,” the nurse said as she prepared to attach it to Jenn. So, this bag of T cells from a 22-year old man in Germany designed to stimulate a graft vs. host disease in her body to kill her leukemia this winter, took quite a circuitous route to her room on the fifth floor at Johns Hopkins last week.
The collection was done in Cologne. It was transferred to Frankfurt via train, then flown to J.F.K. Airport in New York, and then flown from Newark to BWI. It came with a delivery man named Udo in a taxi from outer Glen Burnie to Johns Hopkins. He spent the next three days hanging out at a hotel near Ferndale. Not incidentally – because this bag of lymphocytes is time sensitive – there was a complete backup plan with a different flight through Detroit (if necessary).
8I’m not making this up.
Once it was connected to Jenn, gravity took over and the bag of lymphocytes flowed into her veins. The official prediction from the nurse was “less than an hour” but it only took 25 minutes once she began the drip at 2:22 p.m.
At 2:47 p.m. on the Thursday before Thanksgiving, we believe my wife’s life could be saved for the second time by this magnanimous – and for now, anonymous – angel across the Atlantic Ocean. On June 26, 2014, this German man sent a gigantic bag of bone marrow to save her life the first time. He wrote her this letter signed, “your genetic twin.”
They have genetically identical blood, which is why this will work. It’s why we’ve traveled the world and swabbed folks for the bone marrow registry since the beginning of her cancer. This is how lives are saved – matching folks with the same DNA. Coincidentally, both Jenn and her donor have “B Positive” blood.
And the week before Thanksgiving in America, he gave us something to be very “thankful” for and one day next summer we positively hope to meet him somewhere cool and thank him in person for saving her life – twice!
Of course, we wonder what we’ll say to him. And I wonder what they say to him when they ask him to do this? And, no doubt, they must say it in German, right?
It’s all so big, so incredible – like something in a movie that doesn’t even make sense.
The first time left us speechless. This second time – amidst a country here that’s seemingly lost its …
