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Chicago Hosts Be The Match® Walk+RunJohann Castillo's battle with leukemia kept him on the sidelines of life for more than five years. Many days, he was too weak to play with his two young children or even walk up stairs. But thanks to the bone marrow transplant Castillo received last year, he's been training to join the Be The Match Walk+Run on Saturday morning, April 11, at Montrose Harbor - Grove 16. People across Chicagoland will join Castillo, now 32, along with other blood cancer patients and marrow donors. Their collective purpose: to raise money for Be The Match and enable the nonprofit to help more critically ill blood disease patients find their cure - a marrow donor. Proceeds from the Chicago Walk+Run event, which begins at 8:30 a.m., also will go toward ongoing medical research to extend and enhance the benefits of bone marrow transplantation. Bone marrow transplants require a matching donor, but only 30 percent of searching patients find one within their families. That's where Be The Match comes in. The organization recruits volunteer bone marrow donors and matches them with patients waiting for transplants. The Be The Match Registry is the world's largest listing of potential bone marrow donors and umbilical cord blood units, which cntain the same blood-forming cells as bone marrow. Cord blood - donated by the anonymous parents of a newborn - was the source of the cells doctors transplanted into Castillo on March 19, 2014. By then, Castillo had been in and out of the hospital dozens of times since his diagnosis in May 2009. He went to the emergency room on that Memorial Day because his speech was slurred, he was exhausted and his legs were bruised - a dark blue color. Castillo and his wife, Carmen, thought he was having a stroke. At first, the doctors were more optimistic, suggesting it might just be a cold. Then they performed a white blood cell count. The normal range is between 4,500 and 10,000. Castillo's white blood cell count was more than 400,000. His formal diagnosis: chronic myelogenous leukemia, an uncommon form of cancer. Doctors began treating Castillo with chemotherapy. Eventually, though, his body developed a tolerance for the chemo, and white blood cells again surged throughout his body. Severe symptoms of the cancer also returned. He couldn't lift his legs and he was constantly short of breath. "I felt like a 90-year-old sick man," Castillo says. "It was awful." Doctors said he needed a marrow transplant. But tests showed his sister wasn't a match, so his physicians turned to Be The Match. Time was of the essence. When a matching adult donor couldn't be found on the registry, the search started for a cord blood match. One was found on the registry about a month later. The days following the transplant brought new trials for Castillo. When he returned home to recover, his immune system was still so weak that he had to stay isolated in the family basement - away from his wife and children. "I could hear them upstairs, but I couldn't help them with their homework or hug them," Castillo remembers. "We communicated through FaceTime (News - Alert)." At the height of his illness, Castillo was taking more than 50 medications a day. Today, he takes only one - a multivitamin. And he's preparing to participate in his hometown's Be The Match Walk+Run. The Chicago event is part of a nationwide, 17-city series. The event includes a 5K, 1K and even a Tot Trot, so people of all ages and abilities are invited to join in. To register, contribute, volunteer or support an individual runner or walker, visit BeTheMatchWalkRun.org. Be The Match will hold a donor registry drive at the event. Adult volunteers can join the registry with a simple swab of their cheek. The need for donors is especially urgent among ethnic minorities, whose genetic diversity makes finding a match more difficult. Among all types of donors, those between the ages of 18 and 44 provide the greatest chance for transplant success.
About Be The Match
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