USD Magazine, Summer 1996

On

a whim in the summer of 1993, Kris Sorenson '79 signed up with a bone marrow drive at his workplace and gave a blood sample. Less than a year later, he was lying on an operat– ing table in Washington, D.C., the center of a life-saving drama. A regular blood donor, Sorenson says his decision to register with the National Marrow Donor Program was simple. San Diego's Balboa Naval Medical Center, where he works as a budget analyst for the Department of Defense, runs bone mar– row drives every six months. All he needed to do was walk upstairs from his office. Because the best odds of becoming a bone marrow match are about 1 in 10,000, Sorenson says he didn't expect anything to develop. He was wrong. Halfway across the country in Toulon, Ill., Sarah Gibler was struggling with a bone marrow disease that would turn into fatal leukemia if she did not receive a bone marrow transplant. No one in her family was a match, however, and as a Medicaid patient, she had another battle to face. Illinois' Public Aid program, through Medicaid, would pay the medical costs of the transplant but would not pay for the search to find a non-related donor. Since the family had no funds for a search, she was facing a death sentence.

Through strong lobbying on her part, media attention and getting the right people in the Illinois Legislature to listen, Gibler got that regulation banished from the books. Her search was funded and, miraculously, a potential match was found quickly in Sorenson. "I'm more closely related to her genetically than her own family is," Sorenson explains. "She's a genetic twin. If I had turned my back on her, then she probably would have per– ished." In the spring of 1994, Sorenson received a registered letter informing him that he was a potential donor. Further tests proved that he was compatible, though he was shielded from any information about the recipient. The bone marrow dona– tion program keeps the identity of the two parties anonymous for a year following the donation. "I felt so honored," Sorenson says when he learned he was a match. "It was like God was calling me to do something special. I was so grateful that I was chosen as an instrument for some– thing like this."

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