The Charity
My last adventure in 2016 was climbing Mt Kilimanjaro; the tallest free standing mountain in the world and the highest peak in Africa. I knew even before I booked the trip that I wanted to raise money for Tommy’s the baby charity. This time, choosing a charity has taken a little more thought.
DKMS
DKMS, previously known as Delete Blood Cancer, are on a mission to provide a suitable donor for every person in need of a blood stem cell donation. Every 20 minutes, someone in the UK is diagnosed with a blood cancer like leukaemia, lymphoma or myeloma. A blood stem cell donation from a matching donor could save their lives. All it takes to go on to the UK stem cell registry is a two minute cheek swab, sent to you when you register online.
Why DKMS?
There was a campaign launched in late 2013 to try and find a donor for a little girl called Margot Martini; a 14 month old little girl suffering an extremely rare case of blood cancer. She was a very similar age to my oldest daughter at the time and quite similar in appearance; gorgeous Auburn coloured hair and an increasingly cheeky smile! The campaign struck a chord with my wife and I and we signed up (which only takes a few minutes!) receiving our swab kits a few weeks later.
As with most people we completed the swabbing process and returned them happy in with the thought that we’d “done our bit” and not really expecting anything more to come of it. Little did we realise that this was not the end of “done our bit”!
March 2015 rolls around, just a few short weeks after my youngest daughter had been born, and I’m on a hospital bed hooked up to a machine passing blood taken from one arm, extracting my stem cells and plasma and then returning my “skinnier” blood to my other arm! Yep, within weeks of returning my swab kit I had been identified as a match for someone suffering a terminal fight with a form of blood cancer (unfortunately not Margot) and was donating my stem cells to them.
Today, that person – a chap around the age as myself in Australia – is now recovering well (so far) and has a very different life ahead of them. Thanks to me? No. Thanks to charities like DKMS.