12-year-old Alex Pasichnyk is looking for a bone marrow donor for her rare condition. Aplastic anemia is a disease where the body doesn’t produce enough blood cells to sustain life. Only one in every one million children are diagnosed with this disease every year, which is why it can be difficult to find a bone marrow match.
After months of not finding a match, Alex’s family decided to start hosting events to increase the number of people getting tested. They partnered with OneMatch, the program that provides the test kits. This lead to post-secondary schools opening their doors because the search parameters were looking for people between the ages of 17 and 35. The age of most college and university students. After just a couple of events at NAIT, MacEwan and the U of A, the family’s expectations were blown out of the water.
“Overwhelming would be the word, it’s just amazing how many people want to come out and help. Like complete strangers who don’t know me or my daughter and just the goodness in people. Especially students, who are exactly who we want, the perfect age group and the willingness to help,” said Alex’s mother, Lisa Pasichnyk.
Ethnic background plays an important role which is why they are looking for people of Ukrainian, Polish or English descent to increase the chance of a match. However, everyone is encouraged to get tested because even if they’re not a match for Alex, they’ll get put into a database where they might be a match for someone else who’s in search of a donor.
“At any given time in Canada alone we have about a thousand people looking for stem cell and bone marrow matches, of those numbers we find matches for only about fifty percent of them,” said Robyn Henwood, a Territory Manager with Canadian Health Services.
The family and OneMatch will be doing another event at Archbishop Jordan High School in Sherwood Park on Dec. 12 from 3:30 p.m. to 6 p.m. or you can go to onematch.ca and get a test kit mailed to you.
