Here's another sad story about an international adoptee in need of a bone marrow transplant who is desperately searching for a match. The Associated Press reports:
Sherrie Cramer breaks into stifled sobs as she nears the dirt-streaked former orphanage in China where her daughter lived as a severely malnourished infant.
Once again, Cramer is fighting to keep the child she adopted alive. But this time, it's a battle against leukemia, and the odds are not in her favor.
Without a bone marrow transplant, Katie, now 16, may die from the aggressive blood cancer. The family has just a month, maybe two, to find a donor.
The teenager has no known blood relatives and her best chance of a match will be someone from her Zhuang ethnic group, China's largest minority of 16 million. So Cramer, of Sacramento, Calif., made the heart-wrenching decision to leave her daughter and go to China in search of a donor in the city of Katie's birth.
"I needed to come and do whatever I could do to ask the people of China to help me," says the 56-year-old English teacher and mother of three, all adopted from China. "I can give her everything, I can give her love and clothes and an education, but I cannot give her genetic markers for a match."
A few months ago I posted about Ira, a 7-year-old Finnish adoptee of Indian descent in the same situation. According to the family's Facebook page, five potential bone marrow matches were identified in June, and now the donors are undergoing further testing. Hopefully both Ira and Katie will soon find the donors they need.
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