Two bone marrow matches found

Sarah is a poster child in the search for bone marrow donors. Now her own donor has been found.

“She has a very good match,” confirmed Jay Feinberg, executive director of the Gift of Life Bone Marrow Foundation. “She will be going into the hospital for her conditioning, the treatment that precedes the transplant. It usually involves intensive chemotherapy and usually radiation.”

The nine year-old Boston girl’s face on posters and fliers helped draw thousands of potential donors to be swabbed in testing drives for her and fellow leukemia patients Matt Fenster, 35, of Riverdale and Zack Englander, 20, of Woodmere.

A donor has also been identified for a 64-year-old man with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The match is a direct result of swab-a-thons in the Five Towns and Israel for Zack and the others, Feinberg said in a telephone interview from Dublin, Ireland, where he was attending a conference of international donor registries.

“This is a patient out there who was diagnosed, and needed a donor, and benefited from the fact that there was substantial fundraising and donor testing for a patient named Zack,” he said. Patients never really know that they owe their lives to other patients in similar circumstances, for whom drives were undertaken, he added. Most patients are diagnosed, treated and cured — or not — in relative anonymity.

“It’s a combination of things that all fall into place for a campaign like this to happen,” Feinberg said. First, a patient needs to feel comfortable with putting his name and face on a flier and saying ‘please help me.’

“The other part of the recipe that makes a successful campaign like the one for Zack is having a community that rallies to support a member of their community or someone in need,” Feinberg explained. “The Five Towns is a special place. It doesn’t happen everywhere and that’s a very, very important part of the process.”

Yoni Nierenberg of Cedarhurst, a delegate to the Gift of Life Bone Marrow Foundation, and the organizer of the Five Towns swabbing drives, described his reaction to the match for the 64 year-old as “overwhelming joy.”

“I am blown away with the success ratio of what everyone in the Five Towns has contributed to,” he said. “The real key is that anyone who, in their mind, was doubting whether their efforts were in vain, no longer has to doubt. The proof is in the lives that are being saved at this very moment.”

In all likelihood, Sarah’s donor came from what Feinberg called “other recruitment efforts.” But there may be more good news.

“We have heard that there is another potential match from the Gift of Life database,” said Nierenberg. Further details are not being made public at this time, he said, but “we’re hearing news that will just blow your mind. The potential for additional matches” is increasing.

Sarah’s image will continue to appear on advertising materials for Gift of Life drives “up to the point of the transplant,” Feinberg said.

“Sarah said something very interesting when we first spoke to the family about running drives,” he recalled. The nine-year-old was finishing chemotherapy at the time, he said, and she and her family were under the impression that she would not need a transplant.

“’I’m the luckiest unlucky kid,’ he remembers her saying. She said, ‘I’m lucky that I don’t need a transplant - obviously I’m unlucky that I’m sick - but what about all the other kids who need transplants?’”

“And then the next day she was told that the chemo had failed and she would need a transplant after all. So I think there is an element to this that Sarah is really thinking more about all the other kids out there than herself,” Feinberg said.