Stem-cell donation is not to be taken lightly. It is therefore noteworthy and highly commendable that a young man in our very own Jiangsu Province successfully donated stem cells for a positive match with a patient he had never met against tremendous odds.
On the morning of 18 October, 23-year-old Cao Hengyang, of Pizhou in northern Jiangsu’s Xuzhou City, had hematopoietic stem cells successfully collected for donation to an unknown, blood-disease patient from afar.
That extraction had taken place in the hematopoietic stem cell collection unit in the Affiliated Hospital of Xuzhou Medical University.
The story in fact dates back to April, 2019, when Cao was one day donating blood. There, he met the Pizhou Red Cross Society doing a publicity campaign concerning the donation of hematopoietic stem cells.
After further his understanding on the subject, Cao did not hesitate to leave his own blood sample of hematopoietic stem cells. Cao had also learned that China sees approximately 40,000 new blood-disease patients each year, meaning there are millions of patients in need of hematopoietic stem cell transplantation.
Then, on 20 June, Cao suddenly received a call from his local Red Cross saying that his blood had been found to be a match for a patient. They then asked if Cao would be willing to donate hematopoietic stem cells.
Cao recalled that his first reaction after receiving the notice was surprise, since the success rate for a non-blood-relationship match is only one in 100,000, while many, who like him had left a blood sample, failed to find a successful match in 5, 10 or even 20 years.
With the rare match and the fact that it had been found in a little more than a year, Cao says he felt a kind of predestiny with this patient, reports the Yangtze Evening News. He did not hesitate in agreeing to donate.
Cao’s sample then also passed he criteria for a more-stringent match, prompting him to say, “The God of Destiny has chosen me, which makes me feel it’s incumbent upon me to perhaps help save this patient”.
It therefore came to be that on the afternoon of 13 October, Cao checked in to the Hospital, beginning mobilisation-agent injections a day later. Then this Tuesday, Cao successfully donated 234 ml of hematopoietic stem cells, becoming the 14,154th donor of such in China, the 1,094th in Jiangsu Povince, the 122nd in Xuzhou and only the seventh in Pizhou.