Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Save Seun Adebiyi!

I ran into this article online today about 26 year old Seun Adebiyi, born in Lagos, moved here when he was 6 and is a Yale Law grad who is trying to be the FIRST EVER Nigerian Winter Olympian.

Except he was diagnosed with cancer.

Leukemia.

He's been through weeks and weeks of chemotherapy, but his doctors say his only chance for survival is a bone marrow transplant.

Sadly, only 8% of bone marrow list registrants are of African descent/African American. And for a match, the person needs to be practically IDENTICAL to you. So his chances of finding a match will be upped dramatically if there are more Nigerians on the list.

I got on the list last year, because a friend was pushing a drive for another friend of hers, a Yale Med student who is biracial (imagine how small HER numbers are) . She passed away last August.

The process is really simple. You go on the website (in this case, for a free kit go to www.dkmsamericas.org) direct link to sign up page is https://www.dkmsamericas.org/bone-marrow-donors/become-marrow-donor

Fill out the questionnaire and they will mail you a kit. All you have to do is use the Qtips to take cheek swabs and mail it back in in the pre-paid envelope.

IF (and this is a huge if) you are selected to be a donor, you go in, do some additional testing, and they use a syringe to take some marrow out of your pelvis (not much tougher than giving blood) and thats it.

I have posted a link to Seun's HuffPo article here


Help save this guys life.


Please pass on this information. Even if you are not a match for Seun, you may be able to save someone else's life by signing up.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

She watched it die slowly.

Thursday, January 07, 2010

Is happiness simply a matter of telling yourself to "be happy"? Is it internal and a choice, and not (solely) a result of external stimulus?

There is a thin line between really unhappy and being depressed, and it's incredibly hard to determine what side of the line you're on after a while.