Perfect marrow match found

Lori Grisdale Marsh will spend the next several months in Cleveland.

CANFIELD — A city woman who needed a perfect-match donor for a bone marrow transplant if she is to continue her fight against leukemia has found one.

Lori Grisdale Marsh, 46, who is battling acute myleogenous leukemia and was waiting for an international search to turn up a donor, was notified earlier this month that one had been found for her in Europe. She left Monday for the Cleveland Clinic, where she’ll spend four weeks preparing for and receiving the transplant.

Afterward, she said, she expects to stay in Cleveland for three or four months at a hotel across from the hospital.

She doesn’t know anything more about her donor, other than she’s a 44-year-old woman.

The woman’s marrow cells will be collected in Europe and flown to Cleveland.

Grisdale Marsh was diagnosed with AML in July. A previous blood disorder complicated the search for a donor, because it made her ineligible for a minitransplant. In a minitransplant, her donor would not have had to match her 100 percent.

“I’m excited and I’m scared,” Grisdale Marsh said last week before she left for Cleveland. “The fight of my life is ahead of me.”

Friends of Grisdale Marsh have been holding fundraisers for her living and medical expenses because she is unable to work and has no medical insurance.

A pasta dinner and auction Oct. 28 at the Embassy on Youngstown-Poland Road raised more than $51,000, said its organizer, Karen Naffah. She said about 1,300 people attended.