Torsten and Jada

A tiny red dot

It started with a tiny red dot. In November 2007, a nurse at Holy Family Hospital in Spokane was holding baby Jada when she noticed petechiae on her skin — small red marks caused by bleeding underneath the skin. Most parents and grandparents would not have known what they were looking at. The nurse did. She ordered tests immediately. Jada was one month old.

The results changed everything. Acute Myeloid Leukemia. AML in infants is rare and aggressive; the standard treatment path is intensive chemotherapy followed by a bone marrow transplant. There was no time to read up on it before deciding. Treatment had to start at once. Within days, baby Jada was moved from the maternity ward into a treatment plan that would carry her through the first half of her life. The family was given the diagnosis on a weekend, and by Monday the schedule had already changed for everyone in it.

Until that moment, Jada's family had never thought about bone marrow donation. They learned about it the way most families do — not from a poster at a blood drive, not from a campus signup table, but because their granddaughter needed one to survive. The conversations at home shifted overnight from the ordinary new-baby questions — feedings, naps, names — into something the family had never expected to ask: who could be the donor, and how would the search find them, and how long did they have.

An intense battle

What followed was an intense battle. Months at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center. Five rounds of chemotherapy delivered to an infant whose total blood volume was a fraction of an adult's. Hundreds of blood transfusions to replace what chemotherapy destroyed and to keep Jada stable through each round. The family rotated through hospital corridors and waiting rooms, marking time in lab results and blood counts and the small daily reports nurses brought from the isolation room. Through it all, a search for a bone marrow match was underway.

Like 70% of patients who need a transplant, no one in Jada's family was a compatible donor. HLA matching — the human leukocyte antigen system the body uses to recognize its own cells — is inherited from both parents, and the genetic combinations are so varied that two unrelated people who match each other are statistically rare. Full-sibling match odds are roughly one in four; for an infant with no siblings of compatible age, the family search ends quickly. Her only hope lay among the millions of strangers registered as potential donors around the world.

The search expanded to the 11 million people then registered on the worldwide registry. Eleven million strangers, somewhere among them a possible match, with no way to predict where that match might be found or how long the search would take. The family did the only thing they could: they waited, and the registry searched, and the chemotherapy continued. They learned to read the daily counts and the new vocabulary, and they kept the phone close in case the call came.

A stranger named Torsten

Five thousand miles away in Germany, a young man named Torsten Huber had read a newspaper article about bone marrow donation. Something in the article moved him to act. He registered with DKMS — the German bone marrow registry, the largest in the world by donor count — never knowing if he would ever be called upon. For most registered donors, the call never comes. They join, they wait, the years pass, and the registration sits in a database with millions of others.

Then the call came. Out of 11 million people on the worldwide registry, Torsten was Jada's perfect match. Without hesitation, he agreed to donate. There was no theatrical decision and no extended deliberation — the registration had been the decision; the call was the moment to follow through. He went in for the donation, the cells were collected, and the work of getting them across an ocean to a sick infant in Spokane began.

"Of course I registered to help somebody. I'm really glad that I could help Jada." That is exactly how Torsten described it, then and since. The registry coordinated transport of his cells across the Atlantic to Jada's transplant team in Spokane. He had never met the recipient, and at the time he was not told her name or anything about her. He was told only that the patient was a child whose life depended on the cells he had agreed to give. Years later, after the rules permitted it, donor and recipient met in person. The photo on this page is from one of those meetings.

The gift of life

At seven months old, after five rounds of chemotherapy and hundreds of blood transfusions, Jada received Torsten's transplant. The procedure for the recipient is brief — the donor cells are infused intravenously, like a transfusion — but the days afterward are slow, watchful work as the new marrow finds the bone marrow space and begins producing healthy blood cells. The team and the family waited, daily blood counts in hand, for the first signs that the new cells were taking hold.

The transplant was successful.

Today, she is a healthy young woman — cancer-free and thriving, a living testament to the power of one person's decision to register. Birthdays became unremarkable in the best way. Hospital visits became routine check-ins instead of emergencies. A life that statistical odds said was unlikely became, simply, her life — homework and friends and the ordinary shape of growing up. The numbers that once defined the family's day to day — counts, doses, transfusion volumes — receded into history, replaced by the small ordinary numbers of a child's life: shoe sizes, grade levels, ages at birthdays.

A successful transplant does not mean an immediate return to ordinary life. There are months of close monitoring, infection precautions, and follow-up visits, and the family lives in close range of the medical team while the new marrow establishes itself. Jada moved through that period and out the other side, and the visits grew further apart, until the appointments looked like the appointments any other child has.

Why the foundation exists

In 2009, Jeana Moore — Jada's grandmother, from Deer Park, Washington — couldn't just say thank you. She had to do something that would give other families the same chance her family had been given. She founded the Jada Bascom Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to three things: raise awareness about how simple bone marrow registration is; recruit donors through drives across the country; and remove barriers by helping cover the tissue typing costs that can otherwise stop someone from joining the registry. Each pillar exists because each one, at some point in Jada's story, mattered.

Then she started walking. Steps to Marrow USA — 4,434 miles from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle to New York City, 15 months on foot, averaging 12 miles a day. The walk was not a publicity stunt. It was the actual work: she stopped in communities large and small along the route to share Jada's story and to register donors at drives held in churches, schools, and community halls, and the miles were the path between one drive and the next. The route had to start where the transplant care had been done and end somewhere far enough away that the story would reach people who had never heard it.

Three years later, Sea to Sea Europe — 137 days and over 1,000 miles through Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, from the Baltic Sea to the Adriatic. She walked to thank the country whose registry had saved her granddaughter, and to inspire more Europeans to join. Torsten joined portions of her European walk. The stranger who had saved Jada had become family. The walks remain the foundation’s defining work because they are how the rest of the work — drives, awareness, the cost help — finds the people it is meant for.

Be someone's Torsten

Somewhere in the world, a patient is searching for their match. You could be the stranger who saves their life. Registering takes five minutes online, the cheek swab kit is free, and the registry stays with you for years. You may never be called; many donors never are. But if your tissue type matches a patient, the call you answer changes their life. The decision is not made when the phone rings; it is made when you register, in the quiet moment before any of this is real, when there is no patient, no name, no story attached — just a form, a swab, and a willingness to be reached.

The most powerful thing about Jada's story isn't that she survived. It's that her survival came from one person, half a world away, who had registered as a donor with no expectation of ever being called. Be that person. Every donor on the registry was, once, a person who could have just as easily not signed up — and somewhere, a family is hoping you do. Find your registry.