Jack's Donor

On March 25 of this year, Jack was one year out of his first transplant. Even though the doctors were not using this date clinically, the National Bone Marrow Registry was. In the beginning of March, I inquired about finding out who his donor was and filled out a paper to allow us to give our information out to the donor. Unfortunately Jack passed 2 days after the year aniversary of his first transplant, but we still wanted to know who the donor is and be able to tell them how thankfull we were that not only did they give once but twice and that by giving Jack those cells he was cured from the NEMO deficiency. We had really hoped that one day Jack and would meet his donor and be able to thank them himself, but we now can thank her ourselves. On Friday April 20, (my birthday), Roy got an email from the German Bone Marrow Registry telling us who Jack's donor was and expressing their condolences to us. I have now been in contact with Jack's donor, she is a beautiful young girl, 27 years old and her name is Sandra. She lives in a small town called Erfurt which is located in central Germany. What a wonderful feeling it is to be able to thank her ourselves. We have a little language barrier, but since my mom is from Germany (she came here in 1950) and taught me and my sisters German as well as having taken German in High School, and of course the aid of a translator website, we have been communicating quite well. She is practicing her English with me and I am practicing my German with her and we're doing pretty good. I'm even surprised at how much German I am remembering.

She has had many questions and was so saddened by Jack's passing, but she has been going through all the pictures on the website. When she went into the hospital to donate the first time she was only told that it was for a 3 year old boy in America. A few weeks later when the registry contacted her to donate again she said that there was no question that she would, of course do it again. After the second transplant she was able to inquire about Jack and they told her that he was doing well but she still had no idea about who the child was or what he looked like. The regsitry told her she was only allowed to inquire once a year on the status of the recipient and she was just getting ready to inquire again when the German registry informed her of the loss of Jack. She still didn't know who the recipient was until I contacted her. In my first email I thanked her for donating and gave her the website. She emailed me back and said how sad she was but now she has a name and a picture of the boy she gave to in America.