Cancer care in the valley; the transplant center is in Seattle

Mount Vernon has been the seat of Skagit County since November 1884, when it took the designation from La Conner, and it was incorporated on July 5, 1893. About thirty-five thousand people live here, 197 feet above sea level, sixty miles north of Seattle and fifty-one miles south of the Canadian border. The Great Northern Railway completed its line through the city in 1891. The Skagit River runs through the middle of town and is prone to flooding during periods of heavy rain, so downtown now sits behind a permanent flood wall, and millions of tulips are grown in the valley around it every year.

The county's cancer care is here. Skagit Valley Hospital, founded in 1958, has 137 beds, runs a Level III trauma center through its emergency department, and provides oncology services including PET scanning. Skagit Regional Health also runs the Skagit Regional Health Cancer Care Center at 307 South 13th Street, which the SWOG Cancer Research Network lists as an NCORP institution under the Pacific Cancer Research Consortium. In a rural county, having clinical trials inside driving distance is not a small thing.

An allogeneic transplant — marrow or blood stem cells taken from another person — is done at a transplant center, which is a different kind of institution from a community hospital. NMDP's transplant center directory lists one on Eastlake Avenue East in Seattle, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, performing adult and pediatric transplants. It is sixty miles back down the road she has just walked up, and it is where this walk started. For a family in Skagit County, those sixty miles are not a commute.

Jada Bascom was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia at one month old and had her transplant at seven months. Nobody in her family was a match. The person who could give her what she needed was a man in Germany whose name was already on a registry, put there for reasons that had nothing to do with her, and who agreed when he was asked. Every part of that chain had to already exist before her family knew they needed it.