Emanuel's stem cells a match for teenby Mary Le Arneal Dylan Emanuel is your typical young man who happened to be given an atypical opportunity that enriched his life and gave one 15-year-old boy the chance to have a life.
The story starts during Emanuel’s freshman year at Wayne State College. The 2016 North Bend Central graduate attended an event as part of the Wildcats Academy of Leadership and Knowledge that included a presentation by the “Be The Match” organization. Be The Match is a nonprofit organization founded in 1986 and based in Minneapolis that operates the a registry of volunteer hematopoietic (stem cell) cell donors and umbilical cord blood units in the United States. They match donors with people diagnosed with life-threatening blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma. The speaker was a leukemia surviver himself, benefiting from a bone marrow transplant from this registry. “He did a fantastic job,” Emanuel said. “He got me and all my friends to sign up.” Emanuel and his friends had their cheeks swabbed to join the registry in case they matched a person needing healthy stem cells. Since signing up, Emanuel continued with his life for the past six years. He played baseball at Wayne State for five years (thank you, COVID), graduated in 2021 with a degrees in Chemistry and Health Science. He started a job in Omaha as a pharmacy representative. He didn’t give being on Be The Match’s registry another thought. Until Sept. 15 when Emanuel received a phone call telling him he matched a 15-year-old boy who was diagnosed with leukemia. Was he still interested? Of course, Emanuel said. He went to an Omaha hospital for more extensive testing and turned out to be the perfect match for the teenager. The usual time line from first contact to donation is five to six months. Emanuel made his donation just over a month after the initial call. . “Based on the patients state, they wanted to speed this up as quickly as possible for the best interest of the patient, trying to save his life,” Emanuel said. Emanuel had two more physicals and got a clean bill of health, filled out lots of paperwork and he was ready to go. The stem cell retrieval was going to take place in Washington state. Stem cell can be procured in two ways. The first method, Peripheral Blood Stem Cell (PBSC) donation, is a non-surgical procedure. (It’s like giving blood on steroids, Emanuel said). For five days leading up to donation, the donor is injected four times daily with filgrastim, a medication that increases the number of blood-forming cells in the bloodstream. On the day of donation, blood is removed through a needle on one arm and passed through a machine that separates out the blood-forming cells. The remaining blood is returned through the other arm. The second method of bone marrow donation is a surgical procedure that takes place in a hospital operating room. Doctors use needles to withdraw liquid marrow from the back of the healthy pelvic bone. Donors receive anesthesia and feel no pain during the donation. The patient’s doctors conferred a week before the donation and decided to use the the PBSC method for Emanuel. Emanuel and his brother, Connor, flew out to Washington Oct. 18. The donation took place the next day and they flew home Oct. 20. Read the full story in the print or e-edition. <<Back to the front page |
