Alejandro started practicing sports almost since he started walking. At 8 years old, he was runner-up in a children's swimming tournament where the winner – they organized the competition by technical level, not by age – was two years older than him. He was a healthy child, 90th percentile in height and 50th in weight, in a healthy environment, with parents who did not smoke, who took care of his diet and who exercised. A kid who, furthermore, never got sick.
One day, two years ago, he had a low-grade fever that did not go away with medication and was accompanied by petechiae, small blood spots that appeared on his chin. At the hospital they did a blood count. The values came out altered and they left it entered. As soon as they saw the analysis, the pediatrician-oncologist on duty confirmed the diagnosis that stopped everyone's clock. Alejandro has leukemia. But now the hands are moving too fast: she has four weeks left to find a bone marrow donor who is a match. His blood twin.
Alejandro does not know the reality, but he suffers from it every day. After the diagnosis was confirmed, his parents explained to him that “some little bugs” had appeared and that he was going to have to stop going to school for a while to be treated in the hospital. The first year he attended online classes and this course he was able to start in person. “He was happy, it was nice for him to be able to come back and meet his classmates in the yard,” recalls his mother, María Luisa.
But “the little bugs” appeared again and Alejandro had to return to the hospital. Since January he has barely connected to online classes. «Cancer itself doesn't hurt, but all the side effects do. That's why he doesn't miss sports so much (he practiced swimming, paddle tennis, tennis…), because this takes a lot of physical toll on you. “The physio is helping him regain mobility.” The daily challenge is to keep him entertained between the crafts that the volunteers teach him and the console. Everything so that time passes, a donor appears and, she says, “gets us out of this horrible tunnel we are in.”
María Luisa had to put her world aside and dress as a mother of courage every morning. Her voice is a delicate but firm whisper on the other end of the phone. “Now we are in isolation because their defenses are at zero,” she confesses. Alejandro has a couple of weeks of recovery ahead of him after the penultimate cycle of chemo that has just ended; In total, including the last cycle, about four weeks – five being very optimistic – in which the doctors will finish preparing your body for the bone marrow transplant.
«It's like they emptied it [a nivel celular] to try to trick his body and replace them with the donor's stem cells,” María Luisa graphically explains the process her son will undergo. “The first few months I would be like a baby and I would be vulnerable to many things, but we would advance little by little.”
The problem is that, for the treatment to have sufficient guarantees of success, a 100% compatible donor must be found. Kind of like your blood twin, who can be anywhere on the planet. And Alejandro hasn't found it yet. «Total compatibility is difficult to achieve because the average is 1/4000 inhabitants of the entire world population. We are looking for 100%, although 90% would be better for us to try.”
And the solution is not usually in the family. The parents, except in rare cases of consanguinity, only have 50%, a percentage that is diluted as the family tree is lost through the branches. Siblings are only compatible in 20% of cases. And Alejandro is an only child. “We need urgent collaboration,” says María Luisa from the Almería Maternal Hospital, “we are finishing the procedure prior to the transplant – which will be done in Malaga – and we have very little time left to locate a compatible donor.”
María Luisa is from Almería, where the family resides, and her husband, Alejandro's father, is from Malaga. Their respective circles in both provinces are mobilizing to find the person who can give life to the little one. The National Police, a body to which the minor's paternal uncle belongs, has dedicated itself to searching for a compatible donor. And Málaga Club de Fútbol has joined in with the “I give you my blue and white blood” campaign installed yesterday at gate 8 in which a ticket is given to each fan who donates blood or marrow.
Alejandro's mother wants to thank all the people who are collaborating and makes a call to debunk myths – as Pablo Ráez from Malaga already did, who left a legacy that still endures in the fight against this disease – about donation. «People look scared, but this is not dangerous. It is a simple process, just like when you do an analysis. The only requirements, she remembers, are to be between 18 and 40 years old, weigh more than 50 kilos and be healthy. «With a simple extraction of a few small tubes of blood they study your compatibility. They can call you instantly, after a few years or never call you at all.
If a match is found, the donation process, known as apheresis, is very simple: another blood draw in a hospital setting. First, a drug is applied whose function is to remove the stem cells from the bones and make them emerge into the bloodstream to, from there, extract them from the donor and insert them into the recipient. “You only spend one night in the hospital for the anesthesia and then it is as if you had had the flu: a week later as if nothing had happened,” María Luisa clarifies, “although there are people who go to work the next morning. And since stem cells regenerate, you can donate again as many times as you want. It is giving life in life.
#Alejandro #10yearold #boy #suffers #leukemia #weeks #find #bone #marrow #donor #truth
