Bone marrow donation provides the gift of life

Updated: 12/15/06

Bone marrow donation provides the gift of life

By Jennifer Sicking

University of Mary Hardin-Baylor

BELTON—One person’s whim became another family’s answer to prayer when Jennifer Hammons gave a little of herself to an unknown girl an ocean away.

Hammons, a University of Mary Hardin-Baylor graduate and adjunct teacher, became a bone marrow donor.

Six years ago, Hammons saw a Scott and White Memorial Hospital booth at a job fair. When the people staffing the booth invited her to sign up as a bone marrow donor, she impulsively agreed.

“It was a total whim,” she said.

Her blood type and other facts were entered into the national bone marrow donor registry, and she submitted a blood sample.

After that, she didn’t think about it again until seven months ago—the day she returned home from the hospital with her newborn daughter, Madalyn.

That’s when she received a call confirming she had been matched to someone who needed bone marrow. Officials at Scott and White wanted her to come to the hospital to give additional blood for further testing.

“God’s hand has been in this thing from the beginning,” she said, explaining the delay of more than five years. “When I registered, they confused part of my paperwork with someone else. They had the wrong name.”

Added to that, she and her family had moved three times last year.

“Tracking me down wasn’t that easy,” she said. “They really had to persevere.”

Hammons never questioned her decision to give her marrow.

“I’m a mom,” she said. “It was a piece of cake. That’s someone’s child.”

After attending an information session and signing consent forms, Hammons discovered she was a perfect match for an 11-year-old girl with leukemia who lives somewhere overseas. After Hammons signed the necessary paperwork, the girl’s family was informed a match had been located for their daughter.

“Then they are told that a match is found, not only a match, but an identical match,” she said. “That’s God. The only one who could do that is him.”

The donation process involves taking marrow from her right and left hips, but Hammons insisted the benefits outweighed the discomfort.

“It will be a little uncomfortable, but what’s that compared to having leukemia?” she said.

Now, she wants others to know about the registry and to sign up. While 85 percent of Caucasians that need bone marrow are able to find it, those percentages drop drastically for other ethnicities.

“It goes down majorly if they’re Asian, Hispanic or African-American,” she said.

There is no expense for donors.

“It’s a couple of days out of your life, and it could save someone’s life or a baby, a child or parents,” Hammons said.

For more information, visit the National Marrow Donor program website at www.marrow.org.