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Be the match is on September 21st. Correspondence from author and donor and other images on website at spec.hamilton.edu.

I was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a particularly fast-growing and difficult-to-eradicate type of blood cancer, midway through the first semester of my senior year at Hamilton. Even before I started my first round of chemotherapy, I was told that my life depended on a stem cell transplant, and that those stem cells would likely come from a stranger who had registered with the Be the Match registry.

While I lay in a hospital bed in Rochester, confronting my mortality and existing through chemotherapy, a young nurse 1200 miles south of me received the call that she’d been matched to a young woman with leukemia, whose life would likely be saved by her stem cell donation. As you’ll read in our correspondence below, “there was no moment of hesitation” for Christy when she received this call. Christy donated nearly a liter of stem cells on February 15, 2016, and I received that life-saving transfusion the following day.

Here I am, six and a half years later, alive, healthy, living in Seattle, tired and fulfilled from leading an eight-day-long backpacking trip on the Olympic Peninsula, slightly teary thinking about this time in my life, deeply and forever grateful to Christy, a second sister who is tied to me by stem cells if not genetics.

Christy and I started corresponding shortly after my transplant, though we had to remain anonymous for a year following the procedure, per Be the Match policies. You can read some of those snippets below. We hit it off immediately, a relationship founded upon the relatively sturdy bedrock of saving the other’s life nourished by a natural compatibility that shines through in our letters. We still talk regularly, though we live just about as far from one another as you can in the contiguous United States.

I implore you to drop by the Be the Match Registry in Beinecke on the 21st. A couple questions and a cheek swab take but a moment, and I promise your professor or lunch date will forgive a few moments of tardiness when you tell them you were joining the registry. It isn’t too unlikely that, like Christy, you might be called upon to save a life.