Become Mandi's Hero

Mandi Schwartz of Wilcox is in desperate need of your assistance and it takes just a few minutes of your time.

Mandi, a rising superstar in hockey (Yale University), has leukemia and desperately needs a bone marrow transplant. She has only 30 days left to find a perfect match.  A 9-out-of-10 match may be accepted from Germany if a perfect match is not found.

Everyone is praying that she stays healthy until that transplant happens. She is at home in Wilcox right now resting after a difficult bout of chemo.

It has been extremely difficult to find a perfect match for Mandi because of her Ukrainian-Russian-German descent. Currently there is a worldwide search on for a perfect match with no success. Are you the perfect match?

If you're between 17 and 50 years of age, please consider attending the bone marrow drive in Regina. It takes just 10 minutes, including answering a few questions and a quick swab of your mouth.

Regina - This Saturday and Sunday June 26 & 27 at 13th Avenue between Robinson and Angus Streets from 8-6 pm both days . 
 

Thank you, and please forward to as many people as possible.

Please see Mandi's story below:



“You Don’t Need Superpowers To Save A Life”

About Me
My name is Mandi Schwartz. I'm 22 years old and a junior at Yale where I play forward for the hockey team and am touted to someday become a member of the Canadian Olympic Hockey Team. I also have leukemia, a blood cancer that is destroying my bone marrow and making my stem cells useless.
The only way for me to survive is to have a stem cell transplant and totally replace my unhealthy cells with stem cells from a healthy donor.

The majority of transplants are done using bone marrow cells from an unrelated donor. However, my combined German, Ukrainian and Russian heritage makes it next to impossible for me to find a perfectly matched bone marrow donor even though there are more than 12 million registered donors worldwide.  Those that use partially matched donors frequently suffer and even die if the donor’s cells realize they aren’t in whom they came from.

But there is HOPE!
Become My Hero finds cord blood donors for people like me. Cord blood is taken from the umbilical cord that connects a mother and child after the baby is delivered. It contains the same stem cells that are in bone marrow except they rarely demonstrate life-ending complications if partially matched.

Become My Hero
I’m now in the hospital taking chemo to kill my cancer. I then must have a transplant within four months to survive. My friends have started a Facebook group to give me support while I battle my disease.

Please go to www.BecomeMandisHero.net to check it out.
A lot of them are doing all kind of fun things to raise money to help fund my donor searches, cord blood collection and recovery. If you’ve gotten this card then you probably know at least one of them.

I love them for what they’re doing, and would appreciate if you’d give them your time and enjoy my fundraiser. They will let you know if you are to make a donation online at http://bit.ly/BMHDonations, by check or otherwise