Dozens of community members showed up and showed out on Thursday, July 16, for a bone marrow match drive and family fundraiser to support 17-year-old Stella Valle in finding a life-saving bone marrow donor.
“I literally picked up the phone and talked to our police officer foundation guys and before I could get through a full sentence: ‘what can we do?’” Stella’s father, El Monte Police Sgt. Frankie Valle said. “They literally overnight put this together in conjunction with the National Marrow Donor Program; I just put the bat signal up and my village came.”
Organized by the El Monte Police Officers Foundation with the National Marrow Donor Program, the event gave attendees the opportunity to register as potential bone marrow donors with a painless cheek swab.
MX-3030 Restaurant catered a taco bar lunch, with 100% of proceeds going to Stella’s treatment expenses.
By joining the registry, people may match with Stella, but they may also match with another searching patient anywhere within the United States.
“We’re basically trying to find for our patients a genetic twin unrelated to them somewhere in the world, which is where it makes it very, very hard to find matches,” Jillian Stewart, member recruitment coordinator for NMDP, said.
Stewart understands the urgency of the situation from personal experience.
“I actually was a patient at one point; I got a bone marrow transplant about two and a half years ago,” Stewart said. “I was lucky enough to find a match. That’s obviously why I came to want to work at NMDP, to help people who weren’t as fortunate as I was.”
Another family also attended in hopes of paying it forward. Retired Los Angeles Police Department member Anderson Boyce brought his son A.J., who was born premature and received life-saving blood transfusions.
“He was in the NICU for four months,” Boyce said. “We had an event like this, and the officers showed up, and we found one donor that qualified to give him his blood transfusions. So, we understand what this family is going through.”
Stella was diagnosed with a bone marrow-failure disease called aplastic anemia earlier this year. Currently, the only cure is a bone marrow transplant.
“It was hard and confusing because I didn’t really know what it was and a lot of people I was telling didn’t know either,” Stella said. “I didn’t realize how severe it was until I started to feel more and more weak. It was really hard because my siblings weren’t a match and the one match from the registry ended up not being able to donate.”
Despite the urgent matter, families and officers kept the energy up as they laughed and enjoyed food around long tables in the shade of the tent pitched in the parking lot of the police department.
“Frankie’s a personal friend of mine and someone I’m very close with,” El Monte chief of police Jake Fisher said. “We’re a small, close-knit family department.”
“It makes me feel really happy and supported,” Stella said at the event. “People who have this diagnosis call it ‘the lonely disease’ because no one really knows what it is, or they confuse it with something less severe.”
“Now, seeing all this, I’m hopeful I can get a match.”
Anyone 18-35 years old can go to www.nmdp.org or to the El Monte Police Department’s social media @elmontepolice to register as a bone marrow donor online and have a swab sent to them.
Ellen Wang is an intern with the Southern California News Group through a partnership with the Los Angeles chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA/LA).