Touched by Transplant: Doug's Gift

April is National Donate Life Month. To raise awareness about the importance of organ donation and to celebrate transplant donors, we are sharing stories of HOPE from patients and families touched by transplant. 

This reflection was written by HelpHOPELive client Doug Parisano's sister, Stephanie McAlaine. 

In an instant, our family went from having the usual mundane worries, to the earth-shattering news of cancer when my only sibling, Doug, was diagnosed with chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML).

We jumped in with our most positive attitudes and prepared for a winning battle. With amazing new treatments targeted specifically at CML we felt confident of our course ... yet "the best laid plans" don't always pan out.

For Doug, the specialty chemotherapies just weren't working and within a year we learned his only chance for survival was a bone marrow transplant. Right from the get-go I knew I wanted to be the one to donate that life-saving marrow for my only sibling. But after weeks of testing we learned I wasn't a match...."those darn best laid plans" again!

Now it was up to the grace of a total stranger. What were the odds that one was in the registry that would be a perfect match AND would be willing to go through the painful process?

Thankfully, we were among the fortunate. Gift #1 arrived in December 2012 with the news of a perfect match AND a willing donor - an anonymous 29-year-old man ready to save the life of another he had never met.

Gift #2 arrived on a snowy January 25 - a large dark red bag of marrow harvested from the donor just that morning, which was pumped into Doug's port after a week of heavy chemo and radiation to make room for the healthy marrow. Words cannot adequately describe the deep emotions and gratitude of holding this container of another person's bone marrow given without the expectation of anything in return.

Gift #3 was unexpected.

When your life is thrown into the chaos that is cancer and bone marrow transplant, you cannot get through it alone (even as a family). Gift #3 was the spectacular support from people near and far; people I'd known for years and people I barely knew. People who'd been reading my social media posts chronicling our experience would stop me on the street to ask how they could help. They would shout out "How's Doug?" give me a hug, or make a donation to Doug's HelpHOPELive campaign.

The final gift (#4 if you're counting) was finding HelpHOPELive and discovering that, while we certainly needed emotional and spiritual support, we also needed the financial means to purchase the medicine we needed most, to keep our home and health insurance, and to pay for the illness-related expenses that insurance may not cover.

Having received so much from this amazing experience, I genuinely look forward to giving a gift of life sometime in the future.