Having suffered from acute myeloid leukemia for years, Winkelmann, 67, a retired businessman, learned in 2006 that he needed the stem cells of a healthy individual to survive. Kerry Lutz, then a 26-year-old student at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, didn't hesitate when she got the call from the National Marrow Donor Program -- now called Be the Match -- telling her she had the chance to save a life. "I have always treated my good health as a gift, not a given," Lutz, now 28 and a community health promoter for the Peace Corps in Nicaragua, wrote in a recent e-mail. Last weekend Winkelmann carried a poster of Lutz to honor her in the 16th annual Cancer Survivors' Celebration & Walk.
Nicaragua RPCV Kerry Lutz donates her bone marrow to save a stranger's life
Stem-cell recipient plans to meet his donor
When no family members provided a match, Bob Winkelmann's life was saved by a stranger
By Kristen Kridel | Special to the Tribune
June 10, 2009
When Bob Winkelmann learned extensive chemotherapy and a transplant using his own stem cells hadn't cured his cancer, even his own family couldn't help save him. No relative -- not his children or his brother -- matched his tissue type.
Instead, the Glenview resident had to count on a complete stranger halfway across the country who had signed up on a whim to become a bone marrow donor during a campus blood drive.
Having suffered from acute myeloid leukemia for years, Winkelmann, 67, a retired businessman, learned in 2006 that he needed the stem cells of a healthy individual to survive.
Kerry Lutz, then a 26-year-old student at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, didn't hesitate when she got the call from the National Marrow Donor Program -- now called Be the Match -- telling her she had the chance to save a life.
"I have always treated my good health as a gift, not a given," Lutz, now 28 and a community health promoter for the Peace Corps in Nicaragua, wrote in a recent e-mail.
Last weekend Winkelmann carried a poster of Lutz to honor her in the 16th annual Cancer Survivors' Celebration & Walk.
Although many people don't know how to get involved or haven't even heard of the bone marrow registry, it's an easy way to save a life, Lutz said.
The process of donating stem cells involves "no pain at all," said Dr. Martin Tallman, Winkelmann's doctor and professor of Medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
Unlike donating bone marrow, the donation of peripheral blood stem cells is a non-surgical procedure done in an out-patient clinic.
The process, which feels something like giving blood, takes a few hours on one or two days.
"Patients really have very few side effects," he said.
As needles were placed in Lutz's arms for the procedure, she could think of nothing but the man -- whose name she didn't know -- who would receive her donation.
"I was wondering who the patient was, where he lived ... if he had a family, if he had a real chance of survival. Would I ever get to talk to him?" Lutz said in an e-mail.
Lutz didn't know it then, but the married father of five and grandfather of 14 wanted to get to know her just as badly.
Winkelmann wasn't allowed to try to contact Lutz for at least a year after receiving her stem cells but said finding her was always in the back of his mind.
"I personally wanted to shake the hand of the person who tried to save my life," he said.
As soon as a year had past, both Lutz and Winkelmann worked with the marrow registry to try to find one another, they said.
It took another year before the two connected.
"I started crying instantly," Lutz wrote about receiving that first e-mail from Winkelmann. "It was an amazing, very, very grateful, enthusiastic, HEALTHY e-mail."
She said she called him immediately and they talked for almost three hours.
Still communicating with her three or four times a week, Winkelmann said they're so close he's taken to calling himself her "stem" (as opposed to step) uncle.
And he is flying her to Chicago in July, so he can shake her hand at long last.
"I feel this bond, and we both can laugh like crazy together," Winkelmann said. "I'm hoping this relationship goes on, as strange as it is, for as long as I'm around."
Learn how to join the marrow donor list at marrow.org.
