Today I introduce you to another Cancer Cutie – Emma:

A few weeks after my 5th birthday I started to feel sick and was diagnosed with leukemia on Friday, May 28, 2010. I was supposed to receive chemotherapy treatments until August 2012.

However, on October 9, 2011, I found out my leukemia relapsed. I received aggressive chemotherapy through January 2012 but found out two weeks before my bone marrow transplant that I relapsed again on February 4, 2012. Doctors tried chemo through the months of February and March but could not get me back into remission.

In April 2012, I was enrolled into a Phase I clinical trial and was the first pediatric patient to receive modified T-cells to help fight my leukemia.

You can follow Emma’s story here on
or on her
.

You can read an updated article on Miss Emma
.

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When their 10-year-old daughter Laura was diagnosed with leukemia, Robert Graves, D.V.M., and his wife Sherry were ready to do anything they could to save her. They agreed to try a bone marrow transplant from an unrelated donor — the first ever for a leukemia patient.

Laura received her transplant in 1979 at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. The treatment gave her an extra year and a half of life.

And it inspired Dr. Graves to launch a quest to create a national registry of volunteers willing to donate bone marrow. His early efforts brought together other patient families and transplant doctors, spurring a federal mandate that led to the creation of the National Marrow Donor Program. We began connecting patients with unrelated donors in 1987 with a registry of just 10,000 volunteers.

You can make a donation to Be The Match Foundation
.