(Courtesy of Ezer Mizion) This is the tale of a race against time; a race from Israel to Kasol, India and back again. It all began when a young Israeli woman was identified as a potential bone marrow donor for a cancer patient in Israel. The patient needed a bone marrow transplant immediately. But there was one huge obstacle—the donor was in the middle of a long trek across the Far East!
Staff at Ezer Mizion, the world’s largest Jewish bone marrow registry, were not deterred by this seemingly insurmountable challenge. They weren’t quite sure where the young woman was located, so they tried to contact her in Thailand and Vietnam, without success. They knew she was on her way to Kasol, in the Kullu Himachal Pradesh district in northern India. So Dr. Bracha Zisser, director of Ezer Mizion’s bone marrow registry, contacted Rabbi Yoel Kaplan of Chabad of Kasol and enlisted his help in finding the traveler.
Rabbi Kaplan didn’t hesitate to do his part and soon discovered that the woman had just arrived in Kasol after a 16-hour car trip. Despite her exhaustion and weakness, the woman immediately agreed to accompany the rabbi to the hospital for blood tests the next morning.
Adding to the challenge, Kasol is a small village in the Himalayas and does not have a hospital where this testing could be done. In fact, it is so small that most times the Chabad House runs on a generator because there is limited electricity. The two drove for an hour and a half to the nearest hospital where the rabbi is well-known and they were ushered in quickly. The samples for secondary testing were taken, but Ezer Mizion’s challenges were not over.
Rabbi Kaplan needed to find a way to send the sample to Israel as soon as possible so that it could be tested in the Ezer Mizion labs. “I knew of an Israeli couple who were on vacation hiking in the mountains. They told me they were considering changing their ticket and wanted to leave India sooner than they had originally planned. I contacted them and found a ticket for Tuesday afternoon, 24 hours after I had spoken to them,” said the rabbi. The airport was a 15-hour drive from Kasol, so that didn’t leave much time for everything to get done! By the time Rabbi Kaplan arrived back in Kasol with the samples at 8:00 p.m., there was just enough time for the couple to eat dinner and get on the road in a taxi with the blood samples in hand.
Almost 24 hours after the blood was drawn, the couple arrived at Ben-Gurion Airport in Israel, they were met by Dr. Zisser who personally delivered the samples to the lab where they are currently being tested. If the donor is indeed a good match, the transplant can take place within the next few weeks.
Dr. Zisser commented that, “The entire process, from identifying the potential donor to getting the samples to the hospital took only eight days! This was made possible by incredible people who literally went out of their way to help save a life as quickly as possible.”
Rabbi Kaplan shrugged off his heroic act: “This is a big zchus [privilege] to save a life. For us, living in such a remote place, it’s not a big deal to have to jump through some very interesting hoops but stories like this happen to us very often. It is an added zchus to work with Ezer Mizion and be a true partner in saving a life.”
Ezer Mizion wishes to thank Rabbi Kaplan, the couple who flew the samples back to Israel and, of course, the potential donor. Over the past 20 years, the Ezer Mizion bone marrow registry has grown to nearly one million potential stem cell donors and has saved 3,196 lives in 49 countries around the world. Not all our lifesaving stories are as exciting or harrowing as this one, but for thousands of bone marrow recipients, the efforts we expend to save their lives are appreciated immensely.
