This fall, we’re celebrating and holding tight to what’s most precious—family, friends and enjoying time together. And with the Team Be The Match® FUNd Fest, spending time playing games with your favorite people means making an impact, too—delivering cures (and hope) to patients with blood cancer and blood diseases.
How to play for cures: Just organize a fun (and COVID-appropriate) game like a video game bracket tournament, virtual trivia party, Zoom costume contest or a socially-distanced kickball game. Establish a participation or contest entry fee (the donation). Then create your Team Be The Match fundraising page and start sharing with your social network. The more people you invite, the more money you can raise—and the more lives you can save. Check out the our tips and tools to add more fun to your fundraising.
Play for second chances
Mychaela was just five years old when her mom noticed bruising and red dots on her skin. The first doctor who saw her passed it off as a rash. But after Mychaela’s symptoms began to worsen, blood work revealed a dangerously low platelet count and she was rushed to the hospital. There, a bone marrow biopsy led to Mychaela’s life-changing diagnosis: aplastic anemia, a rare blood disorder that occurs when bone marrow can’t make enough new blood cells for the body to work normally.
Mychaela was in and out of the hospital for months receiving regular blood transfusions and therapies. Eventually it was determined that a bone marrow transplant would be the best treatment option. But because she’s African American, Mychaela’s chance of finding a matched available donor on the Be The Match Registry® was low—only 1 out of every 4 Black and African American patients find a match compared to 3 out of 4 White patients. Amazingly, just one year later, she found an incredible 10/10 match. And after several rounds of chemotherapy and radiation, in March of 2009, she received her bone marrow transplant.
Just like every patient searching for their donor match, Mychaela is so much more than the blood disease she battled for much of her life. She’s an honor student, a ballet dancer, a student leader and this fall, she started at Michigan State University with plans to become a doctor or nurse practitioner. When you play for cures by participating in this fall’s FUNd Fest, you give patients hope and second chances—just like Mychaela got.
Raise money, raise hope
Patients need you on their team. When you help raise money for Be The Match® you truly are saving lives. Every $100 you raise can add another person to the registry. (And more registry members mean more matches, more hope—more second chances.) The funds you raise also support patients with uninsured transplant costs (critical during these challenging economic times) and life-saving research to improve patient treatments and cures. Our patients can’t wait. Join Team Be The Match today as we play for cures. Game on!
