Rihanna and Grey’s Anatomy’s Justin Chambers are asking potential bone marrow donors to come forward and help save the life of a 26-year-old Olympic hopeful who is battling leukemia.
Rihanna made successful public pleas last year and in 2008 to help 6-year-old Jasmina Anema and 43-year-old Lisa Flynn of New York City find life-saving matches. When the pop superstar recently received a touching letter from Seun Adebiyi — who came to the United States from Nigeria when he was six years old, grew up in rural Alabama and graduated from Yale Law School in June — she was so moved by his plight that she joined his mission to recruit 10,000 donors through DKMS Americas, the world’s largest bone marrow donor center.
“Leukemia interrupted Seun’s dream of being the first Nigerian in the Winter Olympics,” says Rihanna. “But together we can help him make his dream come true! We need to find him a bone marrow donor! Please sign up with DKMS!”
For his part, Chambers recorded a PSA for DKMS last month between takes on the set of his hit ABC show, urging minorities to become donors. “My friend Seun is training to be the first Nigerian Olympian in the Winter Olympics but he has leukemia and needs a bone marrow match to survive,” he says. “Sadly only 17 percent of African Americans in need of a transplant will receive one. Join our mission and register with DKMS to become a bone marrow donor today.”
Adebiyi could hardly believe that Rihanna and Chambers took the time to help him and others. “I am deeply touched by their plea for donors, not just for me, but for others as well,” he tells Tonic.
“Their voices are so powerful and it encourages me how they used their influence to raise awareness about this important issue,” he adds. “That was incredible.”
On Sunday, Jan. 10, DKMS and The Yale Club at 50 Vanderbilt Avenue in New York City are holding a bone marrow drive for Adebiyi and others with leukemia from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. For those unable to attend the drive or who would like to donate money to help offset the cost of the $65 registration kits, please visit dkmsamericas.org.
“I am so grateful for this drive and for what DKMS is doing to help me,” says Adebiyi. “I am looking forward to a second chance at life and helping others get a second chance at life,” he says.
Against All Odds
When Adebiyi learned that he had cancer — just after he graduated from Yale Law School — he vowed to get better and help others. “It is strange at 26 to contemplate the prospect of dying young,” he says. “But it makes you live your life in a way that you might otherwise be afraid to. My goals for this year are first, to beat leukemia,” he says. “That is my priority. I hope I can find a donor. I also want to recruit 10,000 new donors to the registry, and continue training for the Olympics.”
Adebiyi swam competitively for years, but missed qualifying for the 2004 Summer Games by a tenth of a second in the 50-meter freestyle. Undaunted, he found another sport to pursue to achieve his Olympic goals: the skeleton. He had never been on a sled, but that didn’t stop him. He moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, which has one of two skeleton training facilities in the country.
His Olympic dreams came to a halt when he learned that he had lymphoblastic lymphoma and stem-cell leukemia — two rare, aggressive blood cancers in June, just three months after he began training for the skeleton.
“I learned about the leukemia in stages,” he says. “I had noticed a swelling in the lymph node in my left groin. They told me I had lymphoma and that it was treatable. So I thought it was just another bump in the road.”
Additional tests showed that there was something wrong with his bone marrow. “That’s when it became a lot scarier,” he says. “I found out I had two extremely rare forms of cancer and that my best chance of survival was to have a new set of stem cells with a bone marrow transplant.”
He was blown away by the diagnosis. “As an athlete, I was in otherwise perfect health,” he says. “I don’t drink or smoke and I eat healthy. It’s part of the athletic lifestyle. So this was a shock. People don’t associate cancer with healthy 26-year-olds. And if you are a minority, it is that much harder to find a donor.”
That is why in addition to recruiting new donors to the registry, he wants to raise awareness among minorities that donors in that community are needed. “We are very underrepresented in the registry and I want to change that,” he says.
Indeed, in the midst of battling his own illness, he and his mother, Bimpe Adebiyi, 59, flew to Nigeria in December to hold the country’s first-ever bone marrow drive. “Nigeria doesn’t have a bone marrow registry and that’s tragic,” he says. “Nigeria has one of the greatest concentrations of donors in the world – but no registry to collect the donors. There are people there from more than 240 ethnic groups, as opposed to somewhere like Switzerland, where the population is more homogeneous. We need to get more Africans into the registry, which will save many more lives around the world.”
To achieve this ambitious goal, he teamed up with Katharina Harf of DKMS Americas, who helped him organize the drive.”Seun is one of the most inspiring people I have ever met,” Harf tells Tonic. “While he is fighting for his own life, he made it his mission to recruit at least 10,000 donors with DKMS and to save thousands of others. Seun’s spirit reminds me of my father’s when he was trying to save my mother’s life — no obstacle is too big to overcome and you can achieve anything if you put your mind to it. But Seun needs our help to make his dream to be in the Winter Olympics come true. Sign up as a bone marrow donor with DKMS and you could save his life or that of other patient.”
Adds Adebiyi: “This is the first step,” he says. “Nigerians are so excited to be a part of this. and now, every donor there will be matched against everyone in the world who is looking for a match. And once we have the infrastructure in place for a registry, we will be tracking tens of thousands of genetically unique donors. This is the most cost-effective way to increase life-saving transplants by targeting genetically diverse and underrepresented ethnicities.”
A Mother’s Influence
Despite his grim diagnosis, Adebiyi has an unwavering optimism about finding a donor — and helping thousands of others, which, he says, “I owe to my mother. It was my mother who taught me the value of perseverance and hope.”
He and his mother — Bimpe Adebiyi, 59, who has a PhD in mathematics from Oxford University and is a math professor -— moved from Nigeria to Huntsville, Alabama, when he was six. “She started a non-profit to help inner-city kids the school system had given up on,” he says. “She has helped hundreds of minority low-income students since she came to America at her tutorial center, The Math Lab, in Huntsville, Alabama.”
But not without sacrifice. “We lived under the poverty line on $6,000 a year in rural Alabama,” he says. “But I never felt a lack of anything growing up. I always felt that I could achieve anything I wanted in life because of her.”
When many of the families she was helping couldn’t pay for the center’s services, his mother took on other jobs to help fund it. “When I was in elementary and middle school, we worked as day laborers picking crops to make money for the center,” he says. “Here was this Oxford-educated woman picking peppers so that she could help other students pursue their dreams. She showed me that anything is possible, which has shaped my attitude toward life.”
While she tutored older students, he tutored students his age – and “for fun,” sat in on her ACT test preparation classes. “We didn’t own a TV so there wasn’t much else to do,” he says. “And I certainly wasn’t going home without her.”
He aced the ACT at 12, which enabled him to take courses in science and math at a local college while he was in high school. “My mother had high hopes for me and taught me that I could do anything I set my mind to,” he says.
Beating cancer
What hurts him the most now is how tough the cancer diagnosis has been on his mother. “This is the first time in her life that she has been forced to sit on the sidelines,” he says. “She shielded me from poverty and racism and encouraged me to excel in academics and athletics. But it is very difficult for her to sit and watch as her son fights for his life. But she never gives up. And neither will I.”
Adebiyi has taken a leave from his job at Goldman Sachs (which donated $10,000 for the Nigerian drive, and which paid for Adebiyi and his mother’s plane tickets to Nigeria) where he is an operations analyst, and moved to New York City, where he is undergoing chemotherapy treatments at Memorial Sloane Kettering — and waiting for a donor. “I am going to beat this,” he says.
His mother, he says, taught him that it takes a village to raise a child. “I am so grateful to everyone in my village who has rallied around me since my diagnosis – my mother, DKMS, Rhianna, Justin Chambers and so many others. My heart is bursting with gratitude for all the help I have received in the past six months, which, despite the challenges I am facing, have been the best six months of my life.””
“It is my turn to give back to the village,” he says. “We are all in this together. So I hope people will come out for the drive or sign up online with DKMS.”
For more information, visit the DKMS wesbsite.
Photos courtesy Seun Adebiyi
Rihanna photo by Bob Xu/Flickr