An Illinois nursing teacher gave bone marrow to a teenage girl she has never met

Alessandra McNamara, a nursing instructor at Harper College in Palatine, Illinois, donated bone marrow in April to a teenage girl from another country whom she has never met, according to the college’s account in the Daily Herald.

McNamara had joined the National Marrow Donor Program registry about ten years earlier, as a nursing student, when she came across a registry table on campus and gave a DNA sample. In January she got a message saying she might be a match. She barely remembered signing up.

The girl has severe aplastic anemia, a rare condition in which damaged bone marrow stops making enough new blood cells and platelets. “How would you say no?” McNamara said. “This is that person’s second chance at life.”

April

Months of phone calls, blood draws, tests and a physical examination followed, and she was cleared about two weeks before the operation. She travelled with her mother-in-law to Washington, DC, where doctors at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital took 900 millilitres of bone marrow, the most allowed for her size and about a third of her blood volume.

She flew home the next morning, and less than a week after the operation she was back at Harper running a course final.

Her sister

McNamara’s sister died unexpectedly in April 2021, five years to the month before the donation, and she said the loss gave the chance to be a donor another meaning.

“I couldn’t help her. I couldn’t save her. But I can save someone else’s life.”Alessandra McNamara

“I trust what I did will help her,” she said. “I trust that it gave her more time.” Registry rules keep donors and patients anonymous at first, and McNamara knows only the girl’s age, gender and diagnosis.