SoCal leukemia patient expecting twins find perfect donor match
A Southern California woman pregnant with twins has found the perfect bone-marrow donor just weeks after her touching story went viral.
A record-breaking number of people signed up to be potential bone-marrow donors following a story about Susie Rabaca, who was in need of a transplant.
She is due to give birth by Dec. 6 and was in desperate need of a bone-marrow transplant to help treat her leukemia.
Within days of her story airing Nov. 22 on ABC7, almost 40,000 people registered for the Be The Match registry.
A bone marrow transplant can be a potentially life-saving procedure for those with leukemia. But for the process to work, the donor needs to be a close match. There are some 30 million people on the worldwide registry.
Rabaca is already a mother of three. Her sister is a 50 percent match, but doctors say it's not good enough to treat her aggressive acute myeloid leukemia.
She needed a 100 percent match, but Rabaca's mixed heritage - Latino and Caucasian - had made finding a donor difficult.
Rabaca and her family have been on a mission to sign up as many potential donors as possible.
The registry is particularly in need of people with mixed ethnic heritage for many other potential recipients without a match.
Registry officials said the thousands of new donations were more ethnically diverse than average.
