“I love to live. I want to be with my kids. I want to smile again. I want to play with them again. If you save my life, you will save my whole family,” said Elsa Nega in her video appeal for a donor.
By Cory Correia (CBC News) |
Vancouver surgeon and the University of British Columbia (UBC) professor Ronald Lett is appealing to the public for help in finding a bone marrow transplant for his wife Elizabeth Nega, who has an aggressive form of leukemia.
Elizabeth Nega, better known as Elsa Nega, discovered that she had acute lymphoblastic leukemia in February and urgently needs a bone marrow transplant. However, the Ethiopian Canadian wife and mother of two has been unable to find a match because of the low number of African donors.
Ronald Lett and Elsa Nega are now reaching out to people of African descent to register as bone marrow donors. They’ve started a website, match4elsa.com, as well as Facebook and Twitter accounts, to find Elsa and other African-Canadians life saving transplants.
“I love to live. I want to be with my kids. I want to smile again. I want to play with them again. If you save my life, you will save my whole family,” said Elsa Nega in her video appeal for a donor.
Lett is the founder and international director of the charity, Canadian Network for International Surgery (CNIS). He met Elsa in Ethiopia while he was there training local doctors to perform essential surgeries.
After dedicating his life to helping others, Lett says being unable to help his wife in her time of need has been difficult.
“I helplessly watch as the love of my life suffers terribly, has devastating complications from her treatment but has no promise of a cure,” said Lett.
“Transplant, which only works half the time, is our only hope and all the news concerning a match for Elsa has been bad too.”
Lack of donor diversity
Since discovering that she had leukemia, Elsa has been put through several rounds of chemotherapy, but after failing to go into remission, obtaining stem cells from a bone marrow transplant has become her only hope of recovery.
Her brother and sister in Ethiopia were her best chance, but neither were a match.
The larger issue in finding a donor for Elsa is the lack of diversity in the donor registry.
Of the 405,000 Canadians on the stem cell registry, only 800 have an African background, and none are a match for Elsa Nega, according to Chris van Doorn with the One Match Program.
Continue reading this story at CBC News
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See also:
- Teen Cancer Survivor Uses Wish to Meet Ethiopian ‘Sister’
- Vancouver Man Fundraising to Help Make Spine Surgeries Available in Ethiopia
- Mission in Rural Ethiopia Full of Adventures, Challenges and Beauty: St. Louis Sisters
- Brookline (Massachusetts) Mother-Daughter to Discuss Working on Obstetric Fistula in Ethiopia
- Ethiopian Family in Edmonton, Canada Grieving the Loss of Their Unborn Child due to Carbon Monoxide Poisoning