doctors and the miracle of it all.
The mind-blowing science and schools and hospitals and donors and money and research that was involved in keeping her alive – it makes me go all Carl Sagan. If she had been diagnosed with the same leukemia a dozen years ago when we met at that hockey game in Manchester, she almost certainly would’ve been dead.
We had amazing insurance. We both have careers. We had no small children. We had a caring network of friends and family and supporters. We had love from people we’ve never met and never will meet.
We were lucky.
She’s still alive.
So, for us, the swabbing thing is personal because it’s given us a chance to live this second life together.
Lots of people did “the right thing” when it came to saving her life.
Lots of people said “yes” to things far more complicated than a table in a corner at a baseball game.
So, you can see why this stuff is so important to us.
And you can see why some of these baseball teams made my blood boil when they turned their back on a simple chance to help some people who are trying to save some lives.
We work with There Goes My Hero and all of their kits enter the registry through the hard work and generosity of Delete Blood Cancer. You need to be healthy and between 18 and 55 to join the registry. In different countries, there are different rules. There are even different age restrictions from registry to registry.
Educating folks about the bone marrow registry to cure blood diseases and save lives is our mission.
You can get on the bone marrow registry right here…
Here’s the first thing you need to know: Jenn’s life was saved because she is white. She’s a Caucasian with blonde hair and blue eyes and that makes up about 90% of the worldwide registry because most of the potential donors in the world come from the United Kingdom and Germany, where they take the bone marrow registry very seriously.
We still have folks show us their driver’s license and proudly state “I’m already a donor” without realizing that this is a different registry. That’s for organs when you’re no longer alive. You don’t have to die to save someone’s life to cure a blood cancer like leukemia or lymphoma.
But you need to be on the registry and that’s where we come in.
Most people of color – folks like me of various European and South American ancestry – simply die if they don’t have a match in their immediate family. Black, Asian, Middle Eastern, Polynesian and any other ethnicity you can think of need more donors and it’s an urgent need for people all over the world who contract one of these otherwise fatal diseases. People of mixed ethnicity are in tremendous peril if they contract a blood cancer and need a transplant.
I can’t think of anything more poignant than literally needing another human being to save your life.
Just think about that.
That was her only hope – a human being that was a perfect match willing to take a long needle to save her live.
The ultimate gift was her only hope.
That’s where we were on June 13, 2014.
And a year later we kicked off the tour on June 13, 2015 and Jenn was a survivor.
We really had no idea what to expect as we set sail to execute 30 straight days on the road and swabbing in as many places as the teams would allow us to have a table. Initially, we figured we’d find a restaurant or bar near most stadiums for the teams that wouldn’t allow us to swab and then we realized it’d be a lot of time-consuming work that would net a very meager result.
Plus, we also learned there’s no real network of swabbers anywhere in the United States that does this kind of work.
We literally had a very difficult time finding and arranging volunteers in each city.
If we could change anything over the course of time, it would be that.
We need people activated to spread the word and help swab folks for the registry. Also, it’d be nice to have medical institutions make it a mandatory practice to swab volunteers who want to be on the registry when they’re getting physicals or visiting their doctors or dentists every year. It’s such a simple procedure.
But setting up the swabbing booths every night in 90-degree heat was a lot of work – in addition to the travel itself. We’re not immune to such things, having slogged beer on and off Ravens and Orioles and Caps road trips over many years. Jenn and I are worker bees so this is right up our alley.
And as much as we expected it to be tiring and taxing, I’m not sure we were really aware of how much we’d laugh and cry over the course of the 30 days meeting so many folks – complete strangers – who wanted to save lives, who were inspired by Jenn’s story or had a story of their own.
This beautiful gal approached our booth at the Diamondbacks game in Phoenix and told me that a stranger from the bone marrow registry saved her life in January. She lifted her cap to show me that her hair was slowly growing back.
We cried a little.
This was a priceless moment on the tour!
Besides being the mule who carried my dirty luggage back home on Mondays and brought me fresh stuff on Fridays during the tour, Jenn was also the sole reason these swabbing stations were operating like a well-oiled machine during the baseball tour.
As you can see, she rolled up her sleeves.
We didn’t get a lot of help locally. The people who swabbed in most places were our friends and family in each city.
So, yes, we got by with a little help from our friends.
But Tampa was far from the only place where folks treated us well. And not the only place where perfect strangers gave an evening to help us swab for Delete Blood Cancer and There Goes My Hero.
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WHERE IT BEGAN, I CAN’T begin to knowin’, but I’ve known Charles Steinberg and Larry Lucchino for as long as I’ve been in journalism.
They kinda built the Orioles when the Orioles were the Orioles. And Camden Yards is what it is because of their vision of the franchise in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Lucchino is a two-time cancer survivor. His name is on the wall as a significant donor at the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins where Jenn was treated for leukemia. I often wonder what would’ve happened had he somehow gotten the DeWitt family to the finish line in 1993 for the purchase of the Orioles but fate didn’t
