Linda McVay : In Her Own Words
- By Linda Mcvay / Photograph by Anne Rayner
Have you ever wondered why you are here? What your purpose is? Can you imagine being given the opportunity to potentially save someone's life?
On Dec. 30, 1996, I started working for Vanderbilt's Bone Marrow Transplant Program. I knew nothing about bone marrow transplant, but I was very eager to learn. I knew it meant helping people with potentially fatal diseases, and that was enough for me to know I would love the job.
Soon after my training began, I learned I would be working with a network called the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP). The network consists of transplant centers, donor centers and collection centers from all around the world. This makes it possible for a patient in the United States to be transplanted using a donor from as far away as London, England, but neither the patient nor the donor has to leave the country. I was tasked with helping these donors and potential recipients connect from around the globe.
It was early in my new role that I learned about the ever-increasing need for more volunteer donors on the NMDP registry. I was very intrigued at the thought of being a donor. The one question that kept racing through my head was how do I sign up?
About a decade later, I learned the answer to my burning question and got my chance at saving a life. It had been years since I was "typed" and entered in the National Marrow Donor Program database, and not a day went by that I wondered when my time would come. I just wanted to be sure I didn't miss the opportunity to donate.
I finally got that call on April 19, 2000. I got word that I had potentially matched with a recipient, a baby girl, not quite a year old, who had leukemia and who was in desperate need of a stem cell transplant. There is no way to put into words how excited I was to be receiving that call. Was this precious baby going to be my recipient?
It was not to be. I was not a match to this baby. But I wasn't ready to give up. The years passed and although many times I wondered if a second chance to be an unrelated donor would arise, I knew my recipient was out there.
May 26, 2005, started out as just another day, but quickly there was a life-changing turn in my quest to be a donor. In the early afternoon hours, I received a request for more testing for another potential recipient. I knew this might be it. All I could do was wait. I am not a patient person, and I had been waiting to give the gift of life for seven years.
My phone finally rang on July 14, 2005, at 6:30 p.m. I was asked to undergo the more extensive testing required of donors to determine if they are a suitable match. I was ready. I knew barring any unforeseen abnormalities in my tests, this was it. Per NMDP guidelines, all I could be told about my recipient was he was a 61-year-old man with refractory acute myelogenous leukemia. I knew, due to his age, he would have to undergo a reduced intensity transplant. For a man of his age, with his type of disease and that type of planned transplant, the outcome wasn't too promising.
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