Marion woman meets her life saver

NORTH LIBERTY - What would you say to the person who saved your life? For Angela Kearns it was a tearful 'thank you.”

Kearns, of Marion, received a bone marrow transplant two years ago and on Saturday she and her bone marrow donor, Matthew Sabongi, met for the first time at the Colony Pumpkin Patch in North Liberty.

Kearns, 42, and Sabongi, 26, met in an emotional embrace surrounded by friends, family and other bone marrow donors and recipients. The two were connected by the Be the Match National Bone Marrow Donor Program, which Sabongi joined in 2011 as a medical student.

Kearns was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia in 2009 and again in 2012. Although none of her family members were bone marrow matches, she was optimistic there would be a match somewhere.

'I thought they'd find a donor, I just thought God would work it out,” said Kearns, a mother of two.

Her situation isn't abnormal, according to Be the Match. Seventy percent of bone marrow recipients find matches in unrelated donors. Whether someone is a match is determined by their human leukocyte antigen, a protein found in most cells in the body.

Sabongi, of Minneapolis, said three months after he registered he got a call that he could be a possible match. After he was a confirmed match, he immediately agreed to donate.

Young donors ages 18 to 44 can make the biggest impact, said Julee Darner, donor services coordinator at the University of Iowa Marrow Donor Program. She said tudies show recipients tend to fare better in the long term with bone marrow donated from people in that age group.

The registry keeps donors and recipients anonymous until a year later, when both parties can choose whether they want to find out the other's identity. So when Sabongi received a thank-you letter from Kearns a few months later, it was anonymous.

And before meeting the woman he helped, he wasn't sure what to expect.

'I was nervous, I didn't know how she would perceive it, and I hoped that she realized it was something that I was willing to do no matter what,” he said. 'I'd do it again in a heartbeat if I could.”

Only 164 Iowa donors have donated marrow to an Iowa recipient. The fact Sabongi and Kearns both received help from the same facility, the UI Hospitals and Clinics, is extremely rare, said Colleen Reardon, manager of the Donor Services Program at the UI's Marrow Donor Program.

Sabongi, a medical student at Des Moines University, said there can be misconceptions that donating is a painful process. Donors have a daily injection to help stimulate stem cells before donation, and Sabongi said the experience was painless. His only discomfort was a slight achy feeling from the injections the day before the donation.

The event hit home for hosts and Colony Pumpkin Patch owners, Dean and Katie Colony. Dean Colony was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma 18 years ago. His donor was an unrelated match from Germany. The two met on his wedding day.

'It was a great feeling to be able to see the person one-on-one, face-to-face and tell them thank you directly to them, look them in the eye and give them a hug and share a few tears,” Colony recalled.

The couple paid tribute to Be the Match with their corn maze in the shape of the registry's logo. They also donated part of their yearly proceeds to the UI Bone Marrow Donor Program.

Reardon encouraged anyone who wasn't a registered donor to sign up.

'You know there's a cure for blood cancer,” she told the crowd at the event. 'It could be you, any of you.”

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