Coffee with All4Cure - Mike (3/4)

When it was time for my allogeneic stem cell transplant, I needed to be matched with a stem cell donor. I have three siblings and they were all tested first. While siblings are the most preferred type of donor, none were an exact match so I had to be matched with an anonymous donor. I went through three donors to find one that stuck. It delayed my treatment for a couple of weeks and when I was finally matched with someone, all they could tell me about the donor was that they were a 24-year-old male in Europe. One of the nurses said he was probably from Germany since a lot of European donors came from there. He was anonymous, but I knew I wanted to reach out to him one day to say thank you. He literally gave me the blood that saved my life and I know what he went through to do that. From his perspective, he did that for a total stranger somewhere on the other side of the world. I had to wait for two years after the transplant before I could reach out to that anonymous young European man. I submitted a contact request, he agreed. I learned his name was Martin and he was indeed from Germany. Of course, I wrote to him in English--my high school German didn’t help too much--and included a Google-translated German copy of my message. He wrote back to me in perfect English and we began emailing back and forth. I just emailed him a couple of weeks ago and he responded right away. He’s 30 years old now and has a new six-month-old baby boy. We haven’t met in person, but he sent me a picture of him holding a beer and I told him I will buy him a round one day. I absolutely must go to Germany to thank him for being such a wonderful person.