MANILA, Philippines – For Kristine Palmero-Sydney, the process of removing marrow from her bone with a long and sharp needle was the easy part. The difficult part was controlling her emotions before meeting the young Filipina girl her bone marrow helped save. 

“I am just so really happy to finally meet you, Mailyna. I am shaking. I am so happy and feel really lucky to be here today to see you,” Kristine Sydney said when she met Mailyna Mayate, a 12-year-old Filipino American girl with a blood disease called beta thalassemia.

The disease causes many difficult complications by reducing a person’s hemoglobin production limiting the lack of oxygen cells throughout the body. It also causes pale skin, weakness and fatigue, among many other complications. 

Emotional meeting

Mailyna said when she met Kristine: “I am now speechless. It is so amazing how someone like you who is so far away…and you still gave it (even) though you did not know me.”

Kristine flew in from Rhode Island to meet with her marrow recipient for the first time on July 29. The meeting was organized by the Asian American Donor Program, a non-profit based in the San Francisco Bay Area, that encourages ethnic minority communities in the US to register to become bone marrow donors for people like Mailyna. 

“It is a disease that you are born with, and it totally changes your life,” Stacy Month, medical director of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology at Kaiser Permanente’s Oakland Medical Center, said. She added, “Transfusions are needed every 3 to 4 weeks, and there can be complications. Patients often die young.”

The only known cure is bone marrow donation. The problem, however, is finding a donor. 

Finding a match

Only 30% of people who need bone marrow transplants are able to find a match within their family and the other 70% hope to find a match within this international registry.

To be a match, you must meet 8 or 9 indicators based on genetics. So patients would more likely find a match within their family, or someone of the same ethnicity. The problem is, only 7% of the bone marrow registry is Asian, and of this low number, less than 1% consists of Filipino Americans. (As of 2011, only 0.6% were Filipino.) 

Mailyna, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, was lucky to have found someone on the opposite side of the country, just in Rhode Island, who was a perfect match. 

“To see her in person is one of the most amazing moments of my life,” Kristine said. “To think that my bone marrow harvest, which was relatively pain-free and easy could give her a chance at living a full, normal, transfusion-free life…I can’t describe how awe-inspiring Mailyna is to me and how lucky I feel that I am part of her life.”

Mailyna told the press during her meeting with Kristine, “I am not sure yet what I want to be, but I do want to do what Kristine did and help others.” – Rappler.com 

To learn more about how to register as a bone marrow donor visit the Asian American Donor Program