Introduction
The 7-year-old Priya Shah is a bright student in her schools
and teachers were looking forward to her passing out from school with flying
colours. However, the wings of hope to succeed in life got clamped by the diagnosis
of a rare disease condition called Thalassemia. Her failing health forced her
to remain in bed and drop out from school. The doctors diagnosed that the young
Priya is waging a losing battle unless she goes for stem cell transplantation.
Despite the will of her family members to donate their stem cells to her, none
of them could come to her rescue as their stem cells did not match hers. Suddenly a man from a far off land came to her
rescue with his stem cells. He is not known to her at all.
Good Samaritan Descends as Knight
The story of a bright student waging a losing war on
Thalassemia was posted on the net after the doctors treating her could not find
a suitable match for the donation of stem cells from her family. In the
meanwhile, they thoroughly scanned the database of donors to find a suitable
match for her blood group. The story of the 7-year-old Priya Shah was read by a
Good Samaritan working in Dubai. His name is Gopal Vachhani from Ahmadabad.
This stranger has become this young girl’s knight in shining armour. He took
pains to come down to India to provide the stem cells for allogeneic-matched
unrelated donor transplant. The family of Priya thinks that Mr. Vachchani is a
God-sent messenger for her and he has brought her back to life from the jaws of
death. However, the donor Vachhani is yet to meet Priya as there is a rule
disallowing their meeting for at least a year. Despite of this, their bonds of
friendship through stem cells has already been forged.
What Makes this Gesture Stand Apart?
The doctors who treated young Priya have confided that a
donor rarely goes to a large extent to honour his commitment. They added that
most of the time the matched and registered prospective donors back out in the
last minute, leaving the critically ill patients to fend for themselves. This
guy working in the Gulf took pains to come down to India so that he could
donate the stem cells from his bone marrow to her ailing body in time. On
making contact, the Gopal Vacchani expressed his desire to do the noble job. He
said that he wanted to save a life from getting snuffed out very early in life.
DATRI Stem Cell Donor Registry
This donor-recipient interaction is facilitated by DATRI
Stem Cell Donor Registry, which keeps a comprehensive database for such cases. The
organization claims that it has completed the 100th unrelated blood
stem cell donation so far. Its co-founder Raghu Rajagopal says that our country
has just 1 lakh stem cell donors registered. Globally, this number is very high
and it stands at 20 million at present. At present, there is a long queue for
donors in India. In reality, the organization is trying to find a donor for
over 1000 patients.
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