Sherrie Cramer breaks into stifled sobs as she nears the dirt-streaked former orphanage in China where her daughter lived as a severely malnourished infant.
Once again, Cramer is fighting to keep the child she adopted alive. But this time, it’s a battle against leukemia, and the odds are not in her favor.
Without a bone marrow transplant, Katie, now 16, may die from the aggressive blood cancer. The family has just a month, maybe two, to find a donor.
The teenager has no known blood relatives and her best chance of a match will be someone from the 16 million people in her Zhuang ethnic group. So Cramer, of Sacramento, Calif., made the heart-wrenching decision to leave her daughter and go to China in search of a donor in the city of Katie’s birth.
“I needed to come and do whatever I could do to ask the people of China to help me,” says the 56-year-old English teacher and mother of three, all adopted from China. “I can give her everything, I can give her love and clothes and an education, but I cannot give her genetic markers for a match.”
Cramer’s effort highlights the lengths to which some ethnic minorities must go to find lifesaving bone marrow transplants. The Asian American Donor Program says ethnic minorities overall have a 50 percent chance of finding a perfect match from the U.S. bone marrow donor registry of 8 million people, compared to an 80 percent chance for Caucasians.
In 2003, the Wisconsin mother of a 6-year-old adopted Chinese girl suffering from a rare blood disease also visited her daughter’s birthplace in search of a marrow donor. She succeeded, and Kailee Wells survived. But it took two years to find the right candidate, and the Cramers have far less time.
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