most of my friends and family on Facebook.
We realized from the letter he wrote in the summer of 2014 that he was an American sports fan. I wrote about the random coincidence that the kid who saved my wife’s life would mention in the first paragraph of his unique introduction letter that he loves the same thing I’ve dedicated my life to since 1984. It was also pretty obvious – despite the DKMS and the German and American governments wanting to “white out” the name of his favorite NBA player and team – that he was a fan of Dirk Nowitzki and the Dallas Mavericks. Two months after we received his letter, we bid on an autographed picture of Dirk at our Ravens Goodwill Halloween Gridiron Bash and Jenn put it away for safekeeping (and, of course, eventually spent 10 days during this summer trying to find it) in October 2014.
We promised that if we ever met him – or “when” in our words – we’d give him the picture.
Sure enough, he admitted in our first IM thread that he was indeed a Dirk admirer. “It’s because he did it the hard way by staying in Dallas,” Niels wrote. “He didn’t take the easy road to a championship.”
We never saw or actually chatted with Niels until Jenn met him at our hotel in Bochum, Germany on August 30. We spent two months exclusively IMing via Facebook. Despite having his email, the only thing we used it for was to get his passport information to book his flight to America. No Skype. No Facetime. Just words…
It’s the way they both agreed it should be. No “real” contact until it was face to face.
His first question – after the ones about her health and quality of life – was about what she was going to do with the rest of her life now that she had survived twice?
For many of you who know me or my wife or our journey, you know that we travel the world and see things. We have a bucket list and we’ve checked off a lot of boxes.
We’ve been to the World Cup in Germany and saw Europe in 2006. We chased the Rolling Stones and U2 around Brazil and Argentina. We traveled to Asia with Cal Ripken in 2007. We spent our 10th anniversary in Bora Bora and French Polynesia. We were just returning from three weeks in Australia and Fiji in March 2014 when Jenn was diagnosed the first time with leukemia.
Niels offered that he wanted to see the world but had only been to a handful of places in the bordering countries near Germany in Europe. He didn’t even own a passport. Jenn told him that going on a safari in Africa was at the top of her bucket list and he agreed. Minutes later, he sent her a picture of his written bucket list of destinations.
***
We originally had booked a trip in early July to Europe with the thought that by the end of June, we’d have some contact with him and could arrange a meeting somewhere near his home in Germany. We were slated to chase Bruce Springsteen through Paris and Rome with a stop in Stockholm, Sweden (a place I love that my wife has never visited). We had a flight to Cologne on July 17th held with a 48-hour period designed to find this mystery man who saved her life.
A little backstory: last November 19, when he saved her life the second time, the blood came with a tracking set of instructions that alerted us to the origin of the donor. It said “Cologne, Germany.” We weren’t totally sure he was from that area but we guessed that it must be nearby to have a blood collection designed to be harvested from him and delivered to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore within 24 hours to save her life.
Alas, with the lingering effects of Jenn’s GVHD and her fatigue and her miserly insurance company leaning heavily on her to return to work so she could keep her job and benefits, she went back to work on June 1st and began to physically struggle again. (P.S. Her employer, Verizon, has been incredibly and wonderfully supportive even though she has missed more than 18 months of work during her battle. But the human beings at Met Life who handle this stuff with cancer survivors are awful, brutal people who made my wife cry on many occasions. So, fuck them! Heartless corporate thugs! And if you know someone at Met Life, you can let them know how I feel! Shameful and shameless all at the same time! The worst of humanity I can imagine.)
On the morning of June 30, I cancelled all of the airlines and booking legs of our European adventure designed to find her donor. She simply was not strong enough or capable of making such a trip in July. By the way: big thanks to Wow Airlines and Vueling Airlines for their …
