Kenny has acute myeloid leukemia, an aggressive bone cancer with a FLT 3 mutation. Because the FLT3 Mutation will cause his cancer to come back after chemo in a few weeks, he is in desperate need of a donor stem cell transplant as possibly the only chance to save his life. The procedure is similar to donating blood, yet, out of 19 million people in the national stem cell and marrow registry, not one person is a match.
Why the scarcity? Kenny is mixed race Vietnamese/Caucasian. As ethnicity plays a crucial role in matching patients with donors, he will most likely match with someone with the same ethnic mix somewhere in their ancestry. Kenny’s could not wait any longer for an unrelated donor match, so in April 2019, his son donated his stem cells for a haploidentical transplant. Kenny is still struggling to get well. To register https://my.bethematch.org/aadp
Leave a Reply