What if?!
What if the SA Bone Marrow Registry didn’t exist?
It’s likely that Noni Mtshali and many others like her wouldn’t be alive today.
What if nobody made financial donations to keep the SA Bone Marrow Registry’s life saving services running?
It’s likely that they we have to close our doors, leaving patients with serious blood diseases without any hope of a cure.
In 2012 Noni Mtshali fell ill and a test showed that something was wrong with her blood. For the next four years multiple blood transfusions didn’t help.
Then in 2016 Noni was finally diagnosed as having aplastic anaemia. The only cure was a bone marrow transplant.
The Registry went into action – within a month they located a match for Noni in Brazil – they couriered the stem cells to South Africa – and Noni received her transplant.
Within a year of her diagnosis, Noni was cured, and a year after that she married, describing her wedding as “a perfect moment of rejoicing after everything that I’d been through”.
Undoubtedly, without the stem cell donor in Brazil, Noni’s cure wouldn’t have been possible.
But without the power supplied by our financial supporters, neither the search nor the courier transport to South Africa could have happened.
Today, Noni is a nurse, a survivor, and an advocate for bone marrow treatment living in Johannesburg. Immensely grateful for her second chance at life, Noni makes it her mission to raise awareness about blood diseases, especially amongst Black South Africans.
Speaking specifically about her Zulu community, Noni explains: “The older generation is reluctant to accept new technology, and up to date information. It’s a big problem. They believe in traditional healing rather than in how medicine has been revolutionised. They also can’t come to terms with donating what they see as an irreplaceable part of oneself, not understanding how bone marrow gets rebuilt.”
Not everybody qualifies to be a bone marrow donor, but anybody can be a partner in the saving of lives by being a financial donor.
It may seem like a remote possibility, but ‘what if’ someone close to you needed a bone marrow transplant?
‘What if’ there was no Registry to search for a match?
‘What if’, even if a donor was found, there was no money to courier the stem cells back to South Arica for a cure?
‘What if’?
When ‘what if’ becomes a reality in someone’s life, and your financial gift can make a life-saving difference.