Be The Match asks students to think beyond the diagnosis

The effects of cancer reach beyond the patient's diagnosis. The women’s basketball team and Be The Match were swabbing students’ cheeks in the Pit today to find perfect donor matches for cancer patients awaiting bone marrow transplants — at 103 registrations, they broke the campus record. 

Be The Match On Campus is a national initiative to inform students of the role they can play in a patient's battle for recovery by swabbing their cheeks and adding them to the bone marrow donor registry.  

Sophomore Naomi Van Nes said this campaign is especially important to the women’s basketball team because of head coach Sylvia Hatchell's past complications with acute myeloid leukemia.

“Especially knowing Coach Hatchell — cancer is a very real thing, and I’m sure everyone can say that they know someone who has been affected by it,” she said. “Something like this which is so small and easy to do could literally save someone’s life, so I think it’s very important to get people involved.”

Hatchell, who is now cancer-free, said bone marrow transplants are common for people with blood cancers like leukemia, lymphoma, myeloma and myelodysplastic syndromes.

“I was lined up for a transplant, but I did not have to have one because my treatments were so successful, but that doesn’t happen very often,” she said. “I was one of the very fortunate ones, but most everyone that has a blood cancer has to have a transplant — that’s the only way you can survive.”

Superior Court Judge Carl Fox, 64, who received a life-saving umbilical cord blood marrow transplant from an organization similar to Be The Match, said he wants to encourage more minorities to sign up for the bone marrow donor registry.

“Seven percent of the registry is Asian-American, 7 percent is African-American, 4 percent is Hispanic and the rest (of minority registration) — which is only 2 percent — is Native American or other, so your odds of finding a match if you’re in one of those groups is really, really low,” he said.

Fox said there are many misconceptions about signing up to be a possible donor.

“One of the things that people believe is that it hurts to donate, it doesn’t,” he said. “Only in about one out of five cases do they actually need bone marrow. 

“For most of them, it’s just like getting a blood transfusion or giving blood, they just draw blood, they get the cells they need and you get the blood back. It’s really important that we debunk these myths and get people out here signing up.” 

Fox said many young people don’t sign up to be a possible bone marrow donor because they wrongly believe cancer does not affect them. 

“I have news for them, I have seen children in there who were 2 years old, 3 years old, 10 years old who have this," he said. "If they can have it, you can have it and any of these other students can have it."

@marcoquiroz10

university@dailytarheel.com