Can the kindness of a Tonic reader help save Sophia Lopez? To start, all it takes is a swab of your cheek.
Sophia, a 6-month-old from Bronx, N.Y. has hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH), a life-threatening and rare blood disease. Since no one in her family is a match, her life depends on a stranger for new bone marrow.
The first step requires a swab from inside your cheek, which is then used to identify possible donors and stored in a bone marrow registry.
This Saturday, May 22, DKMS, the world’s largest bone marrow donor center, is holding a donor drive from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Public School 71, 3040 Roberts Avenue, in the the Bronx. People who can’t go in person to the drive can register online, at www.getswabbed.com.
The chances for a match increase if a donor has a similar ethnicity of the recipient; Sophia is of Puerto Rican and Ecuadorean descent. What makes finding a donor match for Sophia even more difficult is that just 10 percent of people in the national bone marrow registry are of Latino descent, and they have more diverse tissue types.
“I want my precious little girl to be saved,” says her mother, Denise Lopez. “Before this happened, she was so happy, and loved to laugh. But now, she just cries in pain. It hurts me so much to see her like this. I want my princess to live. We need your help.”
Check out the adorable baby Sophia in this video that her 10-year-old brother, Nathan, made for DKMS.
Photo courtesy of the Lopez family.