For many blood cancer patients stem cell transplants are a potentially lifesaving treatment. Sometimes, matches can come from anywhere in the world.
As a hematologist, Dr. Andrea Kew works primarily with patients who have blood cancers such as leukemia or lymphoma and are part of the capital health blood and marrow transplant, or BMT program.
“Sometimes when you're taking care of patients like that, stem cell transplantation becomes their best treatment option, or a treatment option,” says Kew.
Dr. Kew says some patients receive stem cells from a relative or a known donor, but that's not always the case.
“Only about 25% of people would have a sibling donor available, so many times if we need to do a transplant, we actually look for an unrelated donor that could be a match and that donor could be anywhere in the world.”
That's where volunteers like Neil Fraser come in.
The retired RCMP member has been part of the BMT Volunteer Courier Program since it started in April 2013.
He travels across North America and Europe to retrieve stem cells for patients from the Atlantic provinces.
“It's no vacation,” says Fraser. “If it's an overnight trip, you spend part of the day sleeping and then pick up and we realize we have a short window to get back and deliver the cells. We arrive back and that could be any time of the day or night.”
Shelley Brown is the health services manager for the BMT program.
She says the retrieval process used to be done by two on-staff nurses,but as the need for stem cells grew, the volunteer courier program was put in place to help with demand.
“Originally, when the program was developed, the blood and marrow transplant program, it was built to serve about 20 patients per year. So we were transplanting about 20 patients and that was about 20 years ago. Now we transplant about 100, 110 patients per year,” says Brown.
Brown says the work of these ten volunteers is truly life-saving.
“Patients' lives depend on the work that they're doing,” says Brown. “They travel around the world, they pick up stem cells, the patients are sitting here waiting for those cells to arrive, so it's a life-saving task and mission that they're doing.”
Joyce Erskine has been under Dr. Kew's care during her second diagnosis of leukemia in three years.
“I was just tired all the time and I went to the doctor, they took my bloodwork and it showed that my bloodwork was kind of off,” says Erskine.
Erskine says the BMT program has given her a second chance at life, a sentiment that hits home with volunteers like Fraser.
“I lost both of my parents to cancer, so I know, I'm very aware of what families go through, what the actual patients go through,” says Fraser. “To be able to help out in such a meaningful way, there's really no words to describe how you feel when you take that cooler and turn it over knowing that you've played such an important role.”
