Emotional scenes as donor, recipient meet for first time

SINGAPORE — Things looked bleak for Ms Narita Nikitina about two years ago, when she was diagnosed with Acute Myelogenous Leukaemia (AML). Initial treatments did not go well, and she needed a bone marrow transplant to survive — with the chances of landing a match being one in 20,000.

But the LASALLE College of the Arts graduate turned out to be one of the lucky ones. Ms Nikitina, 24, received notice of a match about a month later under the Bone Marrow Donor Programme (BMDP), a non-profit group that maintains a bone marrow donor database.

Her donor, Mr Jeth Ng, had signed up during a blood donation drive in 2009, little expecting he would one day would be called upon to change someone’s life.

They met for the first time today (May 29) at a meeting organised by BMDP, which hopes to raise awareness of the urgent need for bone marrow donors and clear up misconceptions about the procedure, such as concerns about pain and recovery.

Although BMDP has nearly 50,000 donors on its bone marrow donor register, the odds of a match remain slim. Each month, the organisation gets 45 requests for bone marrow donation, and it has at least 50 cases waiting for a match at any given point. It hopes to double the size of its donor database within the next three years.

Mr Ng, 28, now an assistant brand manager, was an undergraduate at Singapore Management University when he signed up as a donor. The inside of his cheek was swabbed to collect his DNA.

“To be honest, I didn’t think I would be a match. At the end of the day, you put your name on the registry … to (help make) a bigger database for matching,” he said today.

When the 28-year-old received an email last year alerting him of the match, he dismissed it as spam, until a BMDP officer called. Initially, he had reservations. “You have no idea what the procedure is about and how they will go through with it,” he said. “You (hear people say) that … it actually hurts a lot.”

But he decided to go ahead, saying: “How often will something like that come along in your life?”

The process of extracting bone marrow involves the donor receiving a series of hormonal injections over four days to stimulate bone marrow production for extraction.

Mr Ng then went through a six-hour blood donation, which he said was not painful at all.

Patient-donor reunions are only allowed after a year to ensure that a patient recovers smoothly. Meeting Mr Ng today, Ms Nikitina, who is Indonesian, was emotional, thanking Mr Ng for the day she was “reborn”.

Speaking to reporters, she marvelled at her luck. “They told me he was the first one they contacted and it’s the match,” she said. Still receiving treatment for her condition, Ms Nikitina added: “I just want to live a normal life. I just want to work, hang out with my friends.”

To raise awareness, BMDP hopes to partner nearly 200 schools and hold outreach events.