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Struthers woman meets the young man who donated life-saving bone marrow
By SARAH LEHR
STRUTHERS
Missy Ginnetti walked into a doctor’s office in 2010 convinced that a lump on her neck was just an infection. A quick dose of antibiotics would fix it, she thought.
She later discovered that she had stage 3 Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer that attacks white blood cells, which help the body fight infections.
“I was definitely in shock,” Ginnetti said. “I was healthy. Never been sick.”
Since her late-stage diagnosis, Ginnetti has endured a litany of medical treatments including chemotherapy and two stem-cell transplants.
Recently, she’s been able to meet with Daniel Cox, a 21-year-old college student from Lanseville, Ind., who donated the bone marrow that made Ginnetti’s transplant in March 2014 possible.
“If it wasn’t for Daniel and Be the Match, I wouldn’t be here,” Ginnetti said.
Cox decided to register for Be the Match, an international registry of marrow, when he was a high-school senior who procrastinated on a project. Cox had two days to come up with a persuasive speech for a class, and so he drew inspiration from a television special he watched and wrote his speech about why people should register with Be the Match. Shortly afterward, Cox decided to practice what he preached and register himself.
When Cox received a phone call from Be the Match informing him he was matched with a potential recipient, he was elated and surprised. Only one in 540 people who register end up being a match.
Ginnetti is an only child, but there is a 25 percent chance that a sibling will be a match.
Privacy restrictions prohibit recipients and donors from meeting until a year after the transplant, so at first all Ginnetti knew about Cox was that he was young and male. The two were permitted to exchange letters, though Be the Match blacked out certain identifying details such as hints about Cox’s location.
This June, Cox and Daniel were finally able to have a face-to-face meeting. They’ve stayed in touch, and Cox visited Youngstown with his family last week.
“We introduced him to Italian traditions,” Ginnetti said. “I told him to be ready to eat because we like to eat here.”
This July, Cox ran, biked and swam an Iron Man competition to raise money for Be the Match. Ginnetti and her family were there to cheer him.
Ginnetti, a mother of three who is married to Mahoning County Engineer Patrick Ginnetti, joked that she’s inherited Cox’s sweet tooth since receiving his marrow and said Cox reminds her of her 18-year-old son. “I felt a bond with Daniel because of that,” she said.
Ginnetti expressed gratitude for the support of her friends, family and doctors. Her ordeal is far from over, though. The transplant wiped out all of her vaccinations, and her immune system remains underactive. “It’s like being a newborn baby,” she said.
She has to avoid a long list of activities that could expose her to infection, including gardening, cleaning her house and eating raw food. She experiences rashes and blisters as a symptom of graft-versus-host disease, a common outcome of the type of stem-cell transplant she received. Additionally, steroid treatments have saddled Ginnetti with side effects including muscle weakness and neuropathy, or nerve damage .
Still, she remains positive.
“You appreciate every day so much more when you really are faced with the fact that you could be gone tomorrow,” she said. “I’ve been fortunate.”
Cox hopes to pursue medical school after he graduates from Indiana University with a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry. He’s considering hematology or oncology and cites meeting Ginnetti as a catalyst for those interests.
Cox urged others to register their marrow. All donation required of him was a few hours in a hospital bed, he said. “You’re out of the hospital the same day,” he said. “People think it’s painful. It’s really not.”
“You have no idea how big the impact you could have on someone and their family could be,” Ginnetti added. “It’s like donating blood times a million.”
To learn more, visit bethematch.org.