Two-Year-Old, Who Battled Aggressive Cancer, Gets a Chance at Life Due to This Donor
One woman gained a special connection that will last a lifetime with a two-year-old girl. Amelia Bellmore was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia when she was only seven months old. It is “a cancer of the blood and…
One woman gained a special connection that will last a lifetime with a two-year-old girl.
Amelia Bellmore was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia when she was only seven months old. It is “a cancer of the blood and bone marrow.” If not treated it will get progressively worse quickly, according to the National Cancer Institute.
In order for Amelia to survive this aggressive form of cancer, she needed a bone marrow transplant.
“For a transplant to be successful they have to really have almost essentially no detectable disease left in their body,” Amelia’s father, Ryan Bellmore, explained to “Good Morning America.”
Continuing he said, “So we were doing tests up until like five days before she actually got the transplant to make sure that she was actually eligible so there was the excitement of realizing she had a transplant and then it was like, can she actually receive it?”
Shawen Bueckers, a college student, registered to become a bone marrow donor through Be The Match.
As their website reads, “For the thousands of people diagnosed every year with life-threatening blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma, a cure exists. Over the past 30 years Be The Match, operated by the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP), has managed the most diverse marrow registry in the world. We work every day to save lives through transplant.”
Bueckers said that when she signed up she didn’t think that she had a clear meaning of what “Be The Match” meant for her then.