It was a most unexpected meeting, but a memorable one as a 34-year old Delhi woman, suffering from Mixed Phenotypic Acute Leukemia, met a mechanic, whose gesture of donating stem cells helped save her life.
 

The woman, a HR professional and mother of a six-year old, was diagonosed with MPAL, an aggressive form of cancer, but was able to overcome it, thanks to blood stem cell transplant through DATRI, a not-for-profit blood stem cell donors registry. "Special thanks to the donor who donated a life to me and my family, today I am living a second life," a release from DATRI, quoting Garima Saraswat, said.

The woman was diagnosed with leukemia in December 2016. She required a blood stem cell transplant immediately and was lucky to find a match through DATRI in February last year. The saviour was a 27-year old mechanic,who had registered as a donor in October 2016 at Masonic Clinic, Coimbatore.

He flew to Delhi with his parents, wife and children to meet the recipient. As per the registry protocol, the identity of donors and recipients are kept anonymous for one year. However, as both the recipient and donor expressed their desire to meet each other and doctors declared that the patients were completely cured, DATRI facilitated the meeting between the two and their families. "Such occasions further motivate our team to work harder in finding a match for every patient in need. There are over 1,800 patients in DATRI's waiting list anticipating a match," DATRI co-founder and CEO Raghu Rajgopal said.

"We need more people to come forward and register as potential blood stem cell donors to be able to save patients on this growing list," he added. DATRI has more than 3.18 lakh registered voluntary donors and has facilitated 354 blood stem cell donations,including 47 donations for international patients.