Cape Town – Less than two years after being diagnosed with rare aplastic anaemia, 25-year-old Jody Lenders finds himself in desperate need of a blood stem cell (bone marrow) donor, as a transplant is his only hope of a cure.
Lenders, who has been in Tygerberg Hospital since November, is holding on to the hope that a donor would be found.
He describes himself as an active and hard-working individual before his diagnosis in March 2017.
“I was at work and noticed some blue marks on my arm. I showed my mom, who works at the same place and she suggested I go to the pharmacist. The pharmacist recommended I go to my GP straight away, and so the journey began,” Lenders said.
The marks were signs of bleeding under his skin, the initial indicators of his illness.
A patient has a 25% chance of finding a sibling stem cell match. The other 75% is a hope of an unrelated matching donor. Ethnicity plays a big role, as matches are based on DNA matches, not blood-types.
Lenders is in search of his genetic twin and the best chances of finding that perfect match generally exists within the same ethnic group, according to the Sunflower Fund.
Lenders’ mother Zelda said when he was diagnosed, it came as a shock.
“This was a blood disease that we had never heard of. We immediately searched the internet for information,” she said.
Aplastic anaemia is also known as bone marrow aplasia or bone marrow failure and is a rare condition in which the body stops producing enough new blood cells, and it develops as a result of bone marrow damage.
This can occur at any age and can be present at birth or occur later in life, as in Lenders’ case.
Since being diagnosed, he has been in an out of hospital as he needed blood and platelets at two-week intervals. His treatment currently includes blood transfusions every four days.
“We have reached out to friends and family to come forward and register as donors. We know that there is no guarantee that they will be a match for Jody. "There are many people out there who are eligible to register and one of them could be his life-saving match,” Zelda said.
Anyone wanting to help can visit the Sunflower Fund’s website, www.sunflowerfund.org.za to see if they are eligible to register, or call 0800 121 082.